Tag Archive for ‘eduwonkette’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Tag Archive for 'eduwonkette'

Who’s Bigger?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 20, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Education News. 8 Comments

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.”

Hello, Jennifer

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 24, 2008 in Education News. 0 Comments

The secret’s out. Eduwonkette, the masked heroine who rights wrongs armed only with data and panache, has revealed her true identlty. And she’s not who you think she is, not matter who you thought she was. She’s Jennifer Jennings, Columbia doctoral student in sociology. Tonight, she’s outing herself and ending one of the edusphere’s most entertaining guessing games. Ms. Jennings says she began the blog last year because she was “bad at crocheting and tired of watching the Yankees lose.” She clearly had no idea it would attract so much attention.

Why am I dropping the mask now? Over the past few months, two things happened. First, people started to wrongly finger other educational researchers as eduwonkette. Given the New York City Department of Education’s affection for my data analysis, some researchers rightfully worried that a case of mistaken identity could have negative implications for their relationships with the DOE. Second, others have started to figure out my true identity. It was a matter of time until someone else made my identity known, and I ultimately decided to introduce myself on my own terms.

Eduwonkette’s coming out party includes a nice little feature in New York Magazine. So now those that have taken issue with the Eduwonkette because of perceived bias, will have to deal wth all those stubborn facts she throws around. I’ll miss the mask, but I’ll continue reading Jennifer’s brilliant blog.

Who Is Eduwonkette?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 7, 2008 in Opinion. 1 Comment

NYC’s best education reporter, Elizabeth Green of the NY Sun, has a big piece this morning about anonymous blogger Eduwonkette, whose blog has become “a thorn in the side” of the New York City Department of Education.

DOE communications chief David Cantor and Eduwonk Andy Rotherham are among those who take shots at EW, alleging that her anonymity keeps readers from evaluating her bias. Having spent decades in the news business before becoming a teacher, I should be predisposed to agree. So why doesn’t her anonymity bug me? Perhaps it’s the nature of her blog. By focusing on research, EW on her best days functions as a first-rate BS detector, saying in essence “here’s the data. You decide.” The fact that she’s got deep pocketed institutions and major players in the edusphere taking shots at her is a testament to her impact. Indeed, you can probably divide edubloggers into two camps: those who admit they are envious of EW’s impact…and liars.

But that’s her second most significant accomplishment. Her first is that she makes education research entertaining. Her anonymity may be frustrating to her critics, but her blog is indispensible.