Question of the Week 2: Impact of Blogs

Question of the Week: What impact have blogs had on the education debate?

Guest Answer from Joanne Jacobs, author of "Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds," blogs on education at joannejacobs.com:

This election was supposed to be about Iraq. It's turning out to be about who's more in touch with working-class Americans. In touch, but not clingy.

Education hasn't claimed much serious attention. Everyone's for it but nobody has articulated a clear sense of how they'd change or continue federal education policy, now built around No Child Left Behind, to help students succeed. Barack Obama has been telling black audiences that parents have to push their children to work hard in school. But that's not a federal policy.

So the effect of education blogs has been . . . let's say subtle. There are dozens of wonk blogs discussing national education policy, as well as thousands of blogs by teachers and parents (homeschoolers and public schoolers) looking at education from the classroom and home perspective.

Principals and superintendents are blogging. Students are blogging. I just hope someone's reading.

All these conversations about local, state and national education issues are healthy.  Concerned citizens are becoming informed citizens. Certainly, Americans don't want to delegate education to the experts. Everybody has an opinion.

However, I see no consensus on the major issues: testing, teacher pay, maintaining order, federal vs. local control, etc.  Education bloggers and blog readers support different ideas about how to improve our schools. A candidate who was reading the blogs wouldn't get much of a sense of where “the people” are.  Except for zero tolerance, which almost everyone thinks is idiotic, they're all over the place.

Perhaps the most we can hope is that politicians will come to believe that a lot more people care about education than they've listened to in the past. Education doesn't belong to the teachers' unions, the school board association or even the PTA.  A much wider range of voices are being heard.

But I don't expect education bloggers to reach the hallowed status of Soccer Moms or Debt-ridden Dads. Not this year, at any rate.