Blog post on blog posting

It's become fairly commonplace within the edublogosphere for teachers to keep weblogs about the ups and downs of education in the trenches; to name just one example, NewOldSchoolTeacher, temporary Eduwonk-in-residence, kept a very funny record of her trials and tribulations during ed school and while student teaching. But it's not every day that you see a school superintendent keeping a daily blog.

Well, the times they are a-changin'. New Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools superintendent Peter Gorman, newly arrived from California this summer, is shaking things up not only by winning school board support for potential forced teacher transfers this school year, but also by launching his very own blog on the CMS website. He blogs about his family, the community members he's met with each day, and some of his ideas about how to improve the school system, and he does a surprisingly good job at updating every business day. His updates for August 3 and 4 were a few days late, but perhaps he can be forgiven, because his calendar, which is also publicly available, shows that he had a State Board of Education meeting. His calendar also verifies what the Charlotte Observer has attested to anecdotally: Gorman's making quite the effort to establish a connection with community members and leaders. Last Tuesday he had ten different meetings on his calendar, and this week he's launching a series of public forums in each of the county's six electoral districts.

Sure, there's probably some political calculation to Gorman's blogging efforts. And the blog isn't perfect; for one thing, there's no syndication feed to allow you to subscribe, which means you have to check back every day for updates. On the other hand, getting a blog up and running (and even knowing what a blog is) shows some technological savvy and a genuine desire to be accessible to the community. Even more, it seems to me like another step towards transparency and accountability when an urban school superintendent is publicly describing and archiving what he's doing every single day to make his school system better. And that can only be a good thing.

-Laura Boyce