RIP National Writing Project

An off-topic post - please forgive the digression:
     I would be remiss if I didn't write something about the demise of the National Writing Project as a result of the recent budget feud in DC, gone because, apparently, it was identified as a earmark. If you're not familiar with the National Writing Project, it is (was), as far as I can tell, the most successful professional educational professional development program in the United States, a grassroots organization that focused on helping teachers become writers, in collaboration with other teachers and writers, and improving the teaching of writing in schools at all levels. In my program, the Yellowstone Writing Projet at MSU (which still exists, and will still exist, somehow, as an independent site, along with hundreds of independent sites across the country now cut loose from federal support) we worked with 20 teachers a year in a month long workshop that emphasized teacher's professional knowledge and capacity, with the belief that teachers who teach writing must be writers themselves, and that people who run the professional development workshops teachers are required (usually with great reluctance) to attend should be teachers themselves.
       The National Writing Project helped over 200 sites around the country run these sorts of workshops, and has for over 35 years, which means that it has worked with thousands of teachers and helped create one of the best professional programs going in education presently, a coalition of teachers, from first grade to university, who have learned to talk about writing and teaching in ways that improve both, a human organization that puts teachers and students at the center of education (imagine that! instead of tests and publishing companies - radical idea, I know). After these workshops, the teachers actually go into their schools and districts and do the professional development themselves, and sites offer continued support in helping teachers do that better.
       I've worked in a lot of institutions as a teacher, and the only one where I felt like I never had to make a compromise as a teacher and as a professional was with the National Writing Project. I bought in wholly to their ideas and their organization, because they start with faith, faith in the teachers who work in our schools. Most education reform initiatives start instead with anxiety and despair about the teachers, and they become ways to legislate against that anxiety, quantitative measurements that demonstrate teacher effectiveness. They don't work, but they look like they work. (It is the educational reform version of the Indonesian "false tap.")
       I cried when I learned they'd killed this, grieved openly. It is a stupid decision. Somehow, the NWP made some list of government waste, because they claimed that it didn't have proof that it worked. I wish they had talked to one, or two, or 2,000 teachers who had been through the program, had visited their classrooms, had seen the difference it makes when teachers are taken seriously as professionals who know what they are doing and who want to do it better. The best work I have ever done as a professional is with the NWP, and while I am committed, with my fellow director Lisa Eckert, to continue the work in some amended fashion, I miss the National Writing Project already, I miss its spirit of faith and hope in education, as I watch the false taps proliferate across the educational landscape.
      Most of all, what NWP was for me was the most incredible network of people, wonderful, creative, and unorthodox people who just like teaching and writing. All those people are still there, and they all feel like I do, I suspect. So something will rise from this. But it doesn't look like it will be the National Writing Project, and if you care about the future of education in the United States, and sustainable educational reform, you should pay attention to this decision: it does not bode well for our schools.