Happy New Year! Regular readers of Fordham’s Flypaper blog will notice big changes today. Our website is the beneficiary of a major makeover (let us know if you like it), and, most importantly, we’re revamping our approach to blogging. We think you’ll benefit.
For the past four years, Flypaper has served as one of the liveliest and more prominent group blogs in the edusphere. And clearly, many of you like it. You enjoy the cacophony of voices and perspectives, on all of the major topics within the world of school reform.
But group blogs have their limits, even when they avoid group-think. As new content is added several times a day, important—and still-timely—posts get pushed down the page, and often out of sight. Readers with focused interests get frustrated and perhaps confused, and potential readers get scared away by the messiness of a lot of posts on a multitude of topics by all manner of authors.
So we’ve split Flypaper into six separate blogs, all of which will live on the edexcellence.net site, and all of which will comprise what’s now called Education Gadfly Daily. Here’s the new sextet:
- Flypaper. Our flagship blog will remain, but will now feature content from Checker Finn and me, along with occasional guests. Its coverage will remain diverse—but the cacophony will ebb.
- Ohio Gadfly Daily. This blog will present incisive analysis on Ohio’s education policy scene, from our intrepid Columbus-based team led by Terry Ryan and Emmy Partin.
- Common Core Watch. To be authored primarily by Kathleen Porter-Magee, Fordham’s tireless standards guru, this blog will cover all things Common Core—and offer steady guidance to states, districts, and others on how to get implementation right. (Other developments bearing on standards, testing and accountability will turn up here, too.)
- Stretching the School Dollar. As schools continue to live under the “New Normal,” of tight budgets and flat revenues, decision-makers at every level need solid advice for how to do more with less. Fordham’s Chris Tessone, our finance director and school-spending whiz, will serve up regular doses.
- Board’s Eye View. Upstate New York school board member and Bernard L. Schwartz policy fellow Peter Meyer will author this blog, which will explore all matters related to the structure and governance of U.S. public education, especially those pertaining to of the problems of “local control” and the future role of school boards.
- Choice Words. This blog, covering the spectrum of school choices from both the supply and demand perspectives, will debut shortly with a dynamite maestro. In the meantime, explore past posts from Fordham on everything from charters to vouchers to homeschooling.
Our home page, at www.edexcellence.net, has been transformed into a faux magazine cover, featuring the most recent and most compelling content from all of our blogs, as well as from the Education Gadfly Weekly newsletter and just about everything that Fordham is and does. That’s the best place to start viewing our latest analyses and products—and to make sure you don’t miss a thing by following us online. (The other option, if you want to continue to get every bit of juicy Fordham-generated blog content, is to register for our “Education Gadfly Daily RSS feed.” Note, too, that if you’re reading this message on the current Flypaper feed, you don’t have to do a thing. You’ll just keep getting all of our content like you always do.)
Do please let us know if you have any concerns or questions (or plaudits). Otherwise, get ready for more great analysis from Fordham in the year to come.
