Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

Technorati ranks more than 100,000 blogs with “authority” calculations “based on a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time.” I don’t know what all that means, but it allows for comparison of blogs across and within all categories. The site doesn’t have an “education” category, so it requires going through the comprehensive listing to pick them out one at a time.

The rankings are updated once a day, but here are the top 20 education blogs as of May 16, with their Technorati authority figures (1000 is the highest possible score):

1) Joanne Jacobs – 610

2) The Quick and the Ed – 601

3) Gotham Schools – 584

4) Education Experts (National Journal) – 576

5) Flypaper – 572

6) Curriculum Matters (Education Week) – 562

7) Eduwonk – 556

8) Cool Cat Teacher Blog – 553

9) Get Schooled (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) – 550

10) Jay P. Greene’s Blog – 527

(tie) Intercepts – 527

12) This Week in Education – 526

13) The School Law Blog (Education Week) – 518

(tie) Education Technology – ICT in Education – 518

15) Kitchen Table Math, The Sequel – 516

16) Why Homeschool – 515

17) Homeschool Creations – 513

18) Dangerously Irrelevant – 507

(tie) Educational Boarding School – 507

20) EdTechPost – 497

Jay Mathews wrote about the latest Brookings Institution report on education journalism. He’s optimistic, but he states something important for those who write about education.

“Mass audiences aren’t that interested in school news. They will always, in my view, prefer reporting on celebrities, business, sports and politics, unless of course the government makes them watch us.”

The Technorati stats bear out Mathews’ premise. The top education blogger, Joanne Jacobs, doesn’t rank in top 1000 of all blogs. Political blogs rule the blogosphere, suggesting that the penchant for focusing on education policy rather than pedagogy is a rational one.

I’ll be back in this space on September 24.

We’re on a roll. Only six weeks after Vermont discovered that hiring more teachers while shedding students does, remarkably, lead to school budget deficits, comes the news that Maine has learned school district consolidation does not lead to budget savings.

Perhaps we could excuse Maine officials for not studying the research, but they didn’t have to. Their own newspapers reported this would happen back in October 2007.

High school students in Grand Rapids, Michigan, will see an “H” instead of an “F” on their report cards if they fail a course. The “H” is supposed to stand for “held.” The Grand Rapids Press reports, ”About 2,400 failing grades were converted to ‘held’ grades for the trimester. Students will have the option of repeating the course, taking it as an online class on Saturdays or evenings and working with tutors.”

I’m with the teachers’ union on this one. Grand Rapids Education Association President said the move reeks of desperation as administrators look for quick ways to improve the percentage of passing students.

It’s also going to cause some confusion for the local 4-H Club.

An aboriginal group is upset that the Australian version of the Daring Book for Girls has a chapter on “How to Play a Didgeridoo.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the instrument, the didgeridoo is a traditional long wooden wind instrument created by Australian aborigines at least 1,500 years ago. But Dr. Mark Rose, general manager of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, said the chapter shows “extreme cultural insensitivity and mammoth ignorance.” Why? Dr. Rose says indigenous people believed there were consequences for women who played a didgeridoo, including infertility.

“I wouldn’t let my daughter touch one,” he said. “I reckon it’s the equivalent of encouraging someone to play with razor blades. I would say pulp it.”

Indigenous author and chair of the Australian Society of Authors Dr. Anita Heiss called the chapter “cultural ignorance and it’s a slap in the face to indigenous people and to indigenous writers who are actually writing in the field.”

Dr. Heiss said she wouldn’t “even pick up a didgeridoo.”

As with most traditions of this sort, whether a taboo is actually mandated is a little murky.

Nevertheless, it illustrates there are many ways for girls to be “daring.”