Fordham’s Mike Petrilli is showing us no love.
Mike has a piece about edublogs in the new Education Next. It’s good; you should read it. But in a table of the top education policy blogs, the Core Knowledge blog is conspicuously absent. And it’s not like we wouldn’t have made the Top Ten, based on Mike’s methodology, Technorati’s “authority ranking” — the number of blogs linking to a particular blog in the past 180 days.
Here’s how the edublogs in my bookmark list stack up based on Technorati’s authority rankings:
Joanne Jacobs 217
Eduwonkette 167
Eduwonk 146
Campaign K-12 125
The Education Wonks 119
Flypaper 95
Jay P. Greene 93
The Quick and the Ed 87
Matthew K. Tabor 85
Core Knowledge 84
This Week in Education 79
Edwize 74
Intercepts 69
Schools Matter 68
Bridging Differences 66
D-Ed Reckoning 56
Edspresso 46
NCLB Act II 40
Sherman Dorn 39
Eduflack 29
Swift and Change Able 27
Thoughts on Education Policy 25
Note, this list excludes pure teacher blogs, even though some of them do veer off (how could they not?) into policy from time to time. Petrilli’s piece, meanwhile, heaps well-earned praise on Eduwonkette, who came out of nowhere in the past year to (by Mike’s Top Ten list) become the Top Wonk.
The story of Eduwonkette is particularly illuminating; she was recently revealed to be Jennifer Jennings, a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University. Rather than merely toiling away in the vineyards of the American Educational Research Association, writing papers for fellow academics, she recently overtook Eduwonk as the top education policy blogger, even though her competitor is a former Clinton White House aide and cofounder of a major Washington education think tank. It’s clichéd to say that the Internet evens the playing field and makes the traditional trappings of power and influence obsolete, but so it is.
Mike is also dead-on in noting the absence of an authoritative parenting blog. “There’s no significant parent voice in the national online conversation,” he writes, “just as there’s no national parent advocacy group in Washington. That’s a real shame; someone should blog about it.”
Pencils out, clear your desks. Pop quiz!
What ”inalienable rights” are referred to in the Declaration of Independence? What are the three branches of government? Name a right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Which branch of government has the power to declare war? And finally, what percentage of Americans failed a test of these and other basic civics, history and economic questions?
Seventy-one percent. Yep. More than seven out of ten earned an F.The average score was 49%. USA Today reports that of 164 respondents who say they have held elected office, 44% was average.
Without knowledge of your country’s history, key texts and institutions, you don’t have a frame of reference to judge the politics and policies of today,” Richard Brake, head of the institute’s American Civic Literacy Program, tells the paper.
Take the quiz yourself, or give it to your students right here. And after they’re done and you’re thoroughly depressed, here’s a link on how to become a Core Knowledge school.
Diane Ravitch applauds the Gates Foundation’s decision to shift the focus of its educational philanthropy, while reminding us that their effort to transform high schools into smaller learning communities is a cautionary tale of seeking a “magic bullet” solution. “We must give the Gates Foundation and its founders credit for their honest self-scrutiny,” Ravitch writes on Forbes.com. ”Most proponents of education reform defend their ideas against all critics, regardless of what evaluations show.”
“The press for small schools, now taken up by almost every big-city district, has diverted our attention from the need to strengthen curriculum and instruction, beginning in elementary schools. Whether a school is small or large, the essential questions in education cannot be ignored: What should students learn? How should they be taught? Are classes too large, especially for struggling students? Are teachers well-prepared in the subjects they teach? Do teachers have the resources they need? Do students arrive in school ready to learn? Until we answer these questions, the size of schools is not a relevant issue.
It’s good news, Ravitch concludes, that Gates is pledging to devote its attention to what happens in the classroom. “The first thing it will learn is that there are no quick fixes. If it targets its dollars wisely, exercises a measure of humility, and continues to evaluate its efforts rigorously, it can make a positive difference,” she says.
For months, Democrats have been squabbling back and forth as to what Barack Obama really believes on education. Is he a reformer? Is he for school choice, charters, accountability? Or is he a traditional democrat, who will echo the teacher’s unions positions on NCLB, merit pay and other issues?
The whole ”reformers vs. status quo” meme is a bit tired and something of a false dichotomy. You can favor accountability and still think NCLB is doing harm. There are legitimate reasons to oppose merit pay without being labeled a defender of the status quo. That said, those who thought Barack Obama was something new in the Democratic firmament are having an “uh-oh” moment with word that Linda Darling Hammond is Obama’s choice as his lead education advisor.
Fordham’s Mike Petrilli wonders if Obama will kill education refrom. Liam Julian, writing in National Review Online, looks at the appointment of the “self-described advocate of progressive education” and concludes that “so far, it seems, tradition trumps change.” American Prospect blogger Dana Goldstein calls the selection of LDH a conservative choice.
Not ideologically conservative, but rather, conservative in terms of what it says about Obama’s plans for education. Groups like Democrats for Education Reform – which favor charter schools and merit pay — have been hoping for Obama to embrace their agenda. And indeed, early in the primaries, Obama was booed at a teachers’ union event for saying he supported merit pay. But since he clinched the nomination, Obama’s statements on education have been more circumspect. The appointment of Darling-Hammond, a teacher quality expert who opposes merit pay and is more critical than supportive of NCLB, signals that Obama wishes to avoid a fight with the unions. He’ll spend his political capital on energy and health care instead.
My internet time waster of choice is the anagram server. Type in a name and in seconds it will summon up every conceivable acronym. It’s great for cheating at Scrabble. On a lark, I typed in Linda Darling Hammond. At the top of the list, it came up with: “Handmaid Ladling Norm.”
Time will tell.
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