Don’t touch that dial. You got it right.

Welcome to the debut of Topics On Public Education or TOP-Ed, a forum on California education policy and the successor to Educated Guess. Besides a new banner and url – http://toped.svefoundation.org — followers of my blog will see that we’ve made room for more voices and new features. It’s our effort to expand the dialogue on education issues critical to our children and our state.

Our main addition is to incorporate more writers with diverse perspectives: teachers, school board members, union leaders, charter school advocates, political candidates, policy researchers, university scholars, non-profit executives, parents, students, promoters of all flavors of school reform and those who oppose them.

In coming weeks, you’ll see some familiar names, like columnist and author Peter Schrag, and be introduced to writers who may join your list of favorites. To kick us off, we have Arun Ramanathan, executive director of the Education Trust-West, comparing the world of Sacramento with George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Jennifer Anastasoff, CEO of the non-profit EnCorps, warning about the consequences of our failure to recruit talented science and math teachers. Tomorrow, Kilian Betlach, an Oakland middle school assistant principal, will report from the trenches on his school’s rocky transformation. Also check out new features: a primer on education policies by Bob Nichols, my colleague at the Silicon Valley Education Foundation in “Did You Know?”  and some useful and fun factoids on California schools in “Just the Facts.”

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to write my blog, The Educated Guess, and do video interviews. I plan to interview both candidates for superintendent of public instruction in coming weeks.

I welcome your thoughts on the site and, as always, your comments on the blog and our contributors’ columns.

The best way to keep up with the site: sign up for daily e-mail updates (go to the olive box on the home page) and follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/jfenster.