“Eduwonkette,” the anonymous blogger hosted on edweek.org, is taking off her mask to reveal herself as Jennifer Booher-Jennings, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Columbia University.
Ms. Booher-Jennings’ blog, hosted on Education Week’s site since January, examines education topics through the lens of social science with a chatty, irreverent tone and plenty of graphics. She has made a splash by criticizing New York City school officials’ claims about closing the achievement gap, likening Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to the fabled emperor with no clothes.
The blog has created such a stir in the city, in fact, that Ms. Booher-Jennings, 29, is the subject of an article scheduled to be published in the Aug. 25 issue of New York magazine. But it wasn’t the media attention that prompted her to disclose her identity, she said last week. Instead, rumors in the “blogosphere” that speculated the blog was written by a professor in the city threatened to negatively affect that academic’s work, Ms. Booher-Jennings said.
Launched last September, the blog will continue unchanged, she said, helping to do the kind of data analysis that newspapers used to do before staff cutbacks.
For a serious, if sometimes
irreverent, look at some of the most contentious education policy debates, read Jennifer Booher-Jennings’ blog, eduwonkette.
“I don’t anticipate making any changes,” she said. “There’s nothing that I have written that I wouldn’t stand behind with my own name.”
