There’s a (brief) backstory here.

In 2010, as part of the $787 billion stimulus, ED doled out nearly $700 million in grants to spur innovation within the sector. In subsequent years, it issued hundreds of millions more to districts, nonprofits, foundations, and academic institutions. These organizations, filled with equally mission-driven folks like Angela Jerabek and Dan Weisberg, have done tremendous work with that money. They’ve learned quite a bit along the way: how to better support teachers, foster innovation within district bureaucracies, and drive evidence-based practices.

So where are they supposed to share this information, and how are they to learn from one another? How are others — from teachers like Jessica Lura and edtech leaders like Matt Candler — supposed to build on that knowledge and take those learnings forward together?

Today’s online environments — media comment sections, closed networks, and existing social channels — can make it difficult. Our words are too often watered down in fear of trolling voices and/or carefully crafted by communications professionals. Those online voices, while a minority, can be vicious and disproportionately influential, especially in education.

We (meaning Medium — I work here) partnered with ED to create an environment where constructive, genuine conversation becomes the norm, not the exception. Where the majority are building on ideas together in public forums, and destructive voices become marginalized.

This begins with diverse, respectful perspectives.

It can be furthered by an enabling environment, which we hope Medium will contribute to with the right product and community (already well underway thanks to teacher-writer-leaders like Shawn White, Rusul Alrubail, Matthew R. Morris, and Paul Emerich France and initiatives like The Teachers Guild and the AFT’s Schoolhouse Voices). We must also begin to shift cultural norms of knowledge sharing away from broadcast press releases toward a more human set of interactions and conversations. And it can only be carried forward together.

This is a personal matter.

The educators in my family — my wife, mother, stepfather, brother, sister, and sister-in-law — all have dynamic perspectives on important issues of practice, and have restricted much of these to one-on-one interactions and dark social. I yearn for them, and others, to feel more comfortable sharing their ideas and believe our students, teachers, parents, and administrators will create better systems if they do.

I also have two daughters, ages two years and four weeks. I want the best for them, which my wife (the pregnant scientist) and I know will involve experimentation, learning, and iteration from the entire sector.

The ED partnership is well underway. On October 20, 70 of us — i3 grantees and many more — got together in San Francisco. (The i3 grantees are a diverse group, as is the ecosystem in which they operate, which is why we also invited other edu-folk — edtech entrepreneurs, nonprofits, foundations, VCs, teachers, and district leaders.) Kicked off by incoming Secretary of Education John King, the largely unprogrammed day was intended to build on a dialogue that has been gaining momentum on Medium, specifically with the i3 community, from building better teachers from day one to what happens when you invite kids to try.

The afternoon culminated with a panel including Arne Duncan, COMPUGIRLS’s Kim Scott, IDEO’s Sandy Speicher, and Medium’s Ev Williams addressing a wide range of topics, from how we discuss failure-as-learning within a public sector context nationally to how technology companies can play a more meaningful role in schools right here in San Francisco. Max Ventilla, founder of the venture-backed private school system AltSchool, asked the panel how we might better align schools with civic services to mitigate challenges of education in urban settings, such as safety and school break-ins.

Even Silicon Valley’s most innovative, it seems, face the same challenges of education’s proletariat today — and are similarly in need of a robust dialogue and action on these issues.