With Peter DeWitt & Michael Nelson

Life is about advantages and disadvantages. Our advantage is that we get to teach kids on a daily basis and hopefully have a positive impact on their lives. We have disadvantages as well. We lack the same resources that some of our colleagues in other school districts have just like we have students that lack the same upbringing and advantages of their classmates.

Some students in our public school system fit in to the school culture without an issue. It's almost like they go through their school experience unscathed because they were popular, good-looking, a good athlete, or did well in school. They entered school on a daily basis feeling engaged and safe, and when they get older, as we all do, they probably remember their high school days as if they were one of the best times of their lives.

As we try to cool off during the summer, many of us take this time to reflect on the year behind us and the year that we have ahead. When it comes to education, it's been a brutal couple of years both financially and politically. We have seen low enrollment, school closures, budgets that didn't pass, rising class sizes, and teacher lay-offs.

Today is my first blog for Education Week, and I'm honored to be writing for them. When I was completing my degree in school administration in 2003 at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y., I met a professor named Dr. James Butterworth. Jim taught a class called Critical Issues and he was tough. He expected our best every day. We had to read a variety of educational literature, and one of my favorite publications was Education Week. Week after week we read articles, discussed and debated. We also had to write reflections on those articles and discuss how we would run schools differently. It was then that I realized I loved to write about education. Education is my chosen profession and I love everything that comes with it.