Welcome to the shiny new version of This Week In Education, now hosted by EdWeek.org. As noted in the post announcing this change (Pimp My Blog), this is either a very brave experiment by an upstart education writer and an established media giant or it’s a really big mistake.
For anyone who is new to me and this blog, I am a freelance education writer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. I write mostly for trade publications and occasionally for policy mags. I also do some consulting, speaking, editing, and research. Before this, I was a Senate education staffer (Feinstein, Bingaman), a short-lived NYC Board of Education advisor, and a researcher and a classroom teacher.
This blog began when I found myself in exile Chicago missing the back-and-forth of my days in DC. Starting in the fall of 2003, it began as a highly opinionated roundup of the best education articles of the week, and then morphed into an even more opinionated blog the spring of 2004. In late 2005 I started another blog, District 299, which is all about education in Chicago (and is still going strong).
This Week In Education has been mentioned in USA Today and the Washington Post, including most recently as one of the top education blogs in the country. The blog includes a morning roundup of news stories, some regular features such as irreverent interviews with educationistas, and the usual smattering of gripes and grievances with other bloggers who simply don’t know as much as I do. Superstars Margaret Paynich and Amanda Millner-Fairbanks provide invaluable research, reporting, and editorial assistance.
The main argument of this blog can be boiled down to the following: Too often, educators don’t understand politics, politicians don’t understand education, and education journalists don’t understand -- or find ways to capture -- the interactions of these two different worlds. Everyone suffers as a result.