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.”
