The Federal Radio Education Committee and the Legacy of the Communications Act of 1934 for Educational Policy

• In Event: Listening Learners: The Political Economy of Media Education During the New Deal, 1935-1948

Abstract

Drawing upon primary document research at the National Archives, University of Maryland, Rockefeller Archive, and University of Wisconsin, this paper looks at how the Communications Act of 1934 influenced educational policies between 1934 and 1958, the year of the National Defense Education Act. The Communications Act created an atmosphere in which liberal New Deal technocrats at the Office of Education and the FCC, and the Federal Radio Education Committee (FREC) worked to streamline national implementation of broadcast technology for educational purposes. Officials emphasized the development of reproducible research results across disparate locations, and among multiple demographic subsets, to confirm that technology could be used for civic and not just commercial purposes.
Between 1936 and 1938 the FREC mandated multiple research projects to develop techniques to delineate reproducible reception to educational content via technology. Beginning with radio broadcasts as “control” predicates, two major initiatives made headway in streamlining understanding of audience reception. Keith Tyler at Ohio State and his influential brother Ralph Tyler at the University of Chicago wrote the first taxonomy of possible reception outcomes to media; and the Princeton Radio Research Project implemented new empirical techniques to identify unique psychological characteristics among intended receivers.
As measurement techniques refined, the Office of Education adopted radio’s empirical survey research method as a national standard to measure reception per se. In particular the influence of approaches developed by the Princeton Radio Research Project were so influential and widely repeatable, that federal and private money-granting institutions began to require quantifiable reproducibility as a core requirement for grant applications. Communication and education policies exchanged language regarding stated outcomes through the 1960s, largely because of the shared expectations that emerged from FREC research projects. I argue that the 1934 Communications Act successfully defined the first standardized expectations for information distribution, by specifying best practices in media production. Technical standards became associated with the relatively new practice (1920s) of administering standardized tests to gauge best practices in the classroom.

Author

• Josh Shepperd, Catholic U of America