A Leap of Faith: Challenging the Media's Problematic Infatuation With Teacher Preparation Objectives

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Framing the Crisis of Education in the News: The Hidden Curriculum and Pedagogies of Neoliberalism

Abstract

When reporting about educational issues such as school failure, widely accessible news outlets and other media simplistically shape narratives that get taken up by the public as commonsense. Some of this shaping is attributable to the profit-driven medium that seeks to best manage the field of visibility for consumers, such that the medium of managing visibility is the message as McLuhan presciently informed. The purpose of this paper, then, is to explore how some media manage the field of visibility in regards to school and teacher quality discourses while other fields of visibility are ignored.
To be sure, underperforming and ineffective schools, administrators, and teachers undoubtedly exist, and investigations into the causes of such “failures” (both real and imagined) are indeed necessary. However, when reporting about educational issues such as school failure, widely accessible news outlets and other media have simplistically shaped the narrative, privileging certain perspectives while ignoring others. On our view, news media underestimate how the complex interactions between such factors as local politics, funding structures, school organization and management, and private sector economic imperatives impact school success while overestimating the effects of teacher preparation on student success.
By engaging in a discourse/content analysis of the media discourse surrounding current education reforms and practices, this paper seeks to make sense of how news media’s reporting on under-performing schools and contemporary school and teacher quality reform efforts have created a narrative that shapes the public’s understanding of education; this narrative directly links student performance in the classroom to teacher preparation.
An analysis of news media reflects the ways in which the neoliberal common sense narrative has hegemonically crept into teacher preparation over the past several years through the guise and acceptance of rankings (National Council on Teacher Quality in concert with US News and World Report) and high-stakes accreditation (e.g. the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation’s Standard 4). The artifacts for analysis include major print and online media outlets reporting on school and teacher quality and the connection with teacher preparation.
Media discourse creates common sense understandings that often go unquestioned. For example, failing or under-performing schools simply attributed to the teachers not being well enough prepared for the profession, regardless as to how long they have been in the profession. In making sense of this dramatic leap, we situate the logic behind this common sense view as a dual-pronged neoliberal attack on two extremely important democratizing and largely public institutions: P-12 schools and university-based teacher preparation programs.
The marketplace provides consumers with media from myriad social and political perspectives. To this extent we believe that the media are positioned to both reflect the dominant neoliberal ideology as well as challenge it. Thus, our paper becomes counter-hegemonic in that we attempt to lay bare the untenable logic perpetrated by major media outlets, a logic that we will show has crept into mainstream educational discourses pertaining to effective schools and teacher effectiveness.

Authors

• Nicholas J. Shudak, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Leslee Grey, Queens College - CUNY