ABSTRACT
We pushed the tables together for our last group discussion so we could all see each other as we talked. It was Saturday afternoon on the final day of the final project directors meeting for the Middle Grade School State Policy Initiative (MGSSPI). Our setting, a hotel room in a western city, lacked windows and featured the neutral wallpaper, wildly patterned carpet, and “cocktail” lighting I had grown to expect in hotels. We'd met in so many hotels, in so many cities, over the ten-year life of the project that we didn't even think to comment on the room itself. Only about twenty meeting participants were left from the original group of thirty, our ranks thinned by departures for points east and south as people left for home. We were all tired, partly from jet lag and the rigors of an intense two-day meeting, but more to the point, tired as the result of a decade's work and the realization that it was all coming to an end.
