I’ve been away from this site and plenty busy, especially because of the project I can now proudly announce: bi-weekly TEACHER ESSAYS IN THE CHICAGO SUN TIMES!

Starting tonight in the Web edition and tomorrow in hard print, an essay by a Chicago-area teacher will appear about every two weeks. The first piece, by Chicago social studies teacher Adam Heenan is now online. I’ll keep everyone posted as further essays, on a wide variety of important education issues, get published.

I’m seeking more teacher essays to keep this series going, so send me your ideas or teacher-writer nominations. Here are the guidelines.

This is a partnership between the Sun-Times and the Illinois Writing Project. I’ve been working for over a year to make this happen, and I’m especially pleased that this will give regular classroom teachers more of a public voice in education policy discussions. I’ve been particularly inspired by the partnership between the Western Massachusetts Writing Project and the Hampshire Gazette that provides a similar forum for teachers; and the great teacher portraits and essays by Peter Smagorinsky, published in reporter Maureen Downey’s blog with the Atlanta Journal Constitution. If this kind of communication were happening in cities across the country, perhaps support for public education would be stronger.