Tag Archives: small

Next week I’ll be on vacation at the beach, and blogging won’t be high on my priority list. But before taking off, I want to leave you with a glimpse into a school model based on the “rock star” teacher idea. This doesn’t mean bringing in real-life rock stars to teach. To my mom and dad, that probably would be some guy named Bon Jovi. To my gramps, maybe some ancient dude named Elvis I’ve heard him talk about. But they’d all be wrong. In a nutshell, the idea is to free up funds to pay the best teachers more by allowing for larger class sizes. The question is: Will it work? Over at Jay Greene’s blog, Dr. Matt Ladner has written about the “rock star” teacher idea several times. The latest highlights a New York Times story about a Washington Heights school scheduled to open in the fall that will pay its eight teachers each $125,000 a year, with a chance to earn more in performance incentives.

In a new Education Next article, Michael Petrilli gives a little primer on the education blogosphere – what he calls “the far end” of the long tail of the blogosphere at large. That makes someone like Joanne Jacobs, one of the more well-trafficked edu-bloggers, “a big fish in this small pond.” One way to measure the influence of blogs is by Technorati Authority, which simply tracks the number of different blogs that link to you in the past 180 days. Since I’ve been out there “watching” for more than 180 days now, I thought it would be neat to know where I stack up compared to Petrilli’s list. (Ironically, the article, intended for a non-savvy audience, is already out of date – or as Jay Greene puts it, “like so two months ago”. Meanwhile, Robert Pondiscio at the Core Knowledge Blog wonders why his site was left off Petrilli’s list.) Anyway, in the world of the education blogosphere, it seems there are no education policy blogs in the top 10. Hmmm. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised by that. Anyway this small “top 10” section at the end of the long tail includes respected friends like Mike Antonucci’s Intercepts, the […]