Bad Teachers Waiting for Superman: Educational Research and Media Exploitation of Public Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 62
  In Roundtable Session: Education in the Media: Making “Sense” of Explicit and Implicit Messages

Abstract

This presentation explores how news reporting and commentary has framed issues of school reform in recent documentaries and popular film. Employing frame, media and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Reese, 2007), we examine recent documentaries (Waiting for Superman, The Cartel, Race to Nowhere, and American Teacher), the comedy, Bad Teacher, and surrounding news reporting and commentary to uncover how such media shape public discourses about education. Our intent is not to simply offer critique of or commentary on the identified films; rather, our purpose is to examine how those films are discussed within news reporting and commentary (including reviews in both mainstream new media sources) as part of a larger debate on school reform. Such an exploration is important because such films and news reporting help to shape, reinforce, and challenge people’s perceptions of the roles and institutions of public formal schooling, and contribute the mediatization of education policy processes, in which policies are reduced to little more than sound bites (Lingard & Rawolle, 2004). Further, the research experts different media sources (particularly news reporting) have relied upon have further constrained what information available to the public (Haas, 2007, Levin, 2004). The result is what Shaker & Heilman (2004) refer as commonsense policy making, a process in which educational policies “need to be understood as ideologically and politically constructed entities, rather than policies that have emerged out of educational research on best practices, or the support of communities” (p. 1466).

In particular, we are interested how such news reporting and commentary connect to current school reform debates among politicians, the public, and educational researchers, particularly in regard to how writers report on educational research as part of the meaning-making process. How the media shapes these debates is important because it creates what Bourdieu called “a reality effect”: “The simple report, the very fact of reporting, of putting on record as a reporter, always implies a social construction of reality that can mobilize (or demobilize) individuals or groups” (1996, p. 21).

Ultimately, this proposal responds to earlier challenges regarding researching the role of the media in constructing understandings about educational research and issues. Gerstl-Pepin (2007) has commented,

"The media is a hegemonic space, but this does not mean that there is no opportunity to bring about change. What is needed is an aggressive effort on our part to provide the news media and the candidates themselves with more intricate understanding of educational problems that encompass the concerns of underrepresented groups (p. 52)"

However, if educational researchers are to better respond to how their research is employed in the media as part of the policy making process, they must first understand how that research is part of the larger narrative about public education and school reform, particularly as it pertains to meeting the needs of the nation’s most vulnerable. This presentation hopes to add to the growing body of research regarding education in the media, to build a base from which the educational research community might respond.

Authors

• Rebecca A. Goldstein, Montclair State University

• Sheila L. Macrine, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Shareen Shibli, North Bergen High School