The Awful State of Education Blogging

Inspired by Corey Bower's "Blog Posts in Need of Improvement," I now begin the series "The Awful State of Education Blogging."

From D-Ed Reckoning, on the recent EPI "Bolder and Broader" report:

"First, what we have here is an Appeal to Authority without any authority. It's not like any of the sixty jackasses quasi-celebrities that lent their well-known name to promote this initiative know any more about raising the achievement of low-SES children than you do."

Today's winner has not only read the work of all 60 persons, but also met each of them in person, thus allowing him to conclude that they are both wrong and 'jackasses' (in all fairness, he puts 'jackasses' in cutesy strikethrough font).

The author then plummits into a confused discussion about the amount of variance in student achievement explained by socio-economic status. While arguing that SES explains only about 20% of the variance in student achievement, he fails to acknowledge that this is a much larger chunk than many school inputs predict.

I realized that most of us blog quickly and episodically, thus meaning that our thoughts may be ill-formed or hastily expressed. Thus, we bloggers are wise to strike a tone of modesty and generosity in our posts.