An Analysis of Trends in New York Times

An Analysis of Trends in New York Times

Reporting on Education in 2010

By Robert Scott[1], Willie Fullilove[2], Tyrone Farrakhan Muhammad2,

Erick Nava2, Luis Saucedo2, Earl Walker2, William Wells2

Abstract

We looked at education articles published in the New York Times between January 1 and December 31, 2010 to create a snapshot of the year’s educational reporting at The Times. A total of 99 articles from the Front Page section were reviewed. We describe and discuss these newsworthy stories on the education sector, and we also reflect on the prerogatives of the storyteller. The power of the The Times goes beyond mere reporting to a self-appointed role in framing the discourse. We read The Times critique of US Schools which was directed chiefly toward teachers, unions, and test scores. This was the status quo of educational analysis in 2010, which means that The Times played a role in producing and reproducing the status quo analysis of our nation’s schools.

Introduction

This paper was born partly of necessity. As a group of researchers in an extremely resource deprived institution (a prison in Danville, Illinois) we had zero access to information technology, a tiny library, and clearance protocol standing in the way of each book we might wish to bring into the prison. Undeterred by this challenge, the study of education itself motivated our seven-person group. Having organized around the agenda of analyzing the political and historical roots of educational trends in the United States, we started by reading historical texts by John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Carter G. Woodson. In each case, our discussion drifted to the present state of schools. How does Dewey’s (1902) proposed balance between “child and curriculum” apply to the era of high-stakes testing? How do we apply the insights of Woodson (1933) in the era of colorblindness? Is the revolutionary pedagogy of Freire (1973) obsolete now that business leaders are chosen to lead school districts? One way to research these questions was to analyze the coverage of the United States’ Education System in 2010, viewed through the lens of the New York Times.

Methods

The study began with a search of the New York Times’ online archive. The search found 6238 articles in which the word “education” appeared in 2010, spread between 30 sections (see Table 1). For reasons related to the amount of time we would have to prepare a manuscript, we focused on the 286 articles in the Front Page section that mention “education.” Of those, many were not about the school system but issues directly connected with it; two examples would be sexual abuse of school-aged boys by Catholic priests, and year-long constant theme of state budget deficits and the obligatory mantra of cutting “state services” such as education. By contrast, others such as the scandals related to online bullying and text messaging were included because the articles focused on school policies. Finally, articles regarding educational issues faced in foreign countries were excluded. In this narrow sense, we found that 99 articles were published in the Front Page section of the Times on issues facing our nation’s schools [1-99].

We agreed to divide the 99 articles into seven packets of approximately 14 articles each, and distributed them amongst ourselves. We agreed on a writing assignment: compose no less than one sentence, and no more than one paragraph, on each of the articles one has access to. Upon meeting, we would exchange packets of articles, and work on synthesizing and polishing the writing. Themes emerged, such as the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" contest, or the trend toward evaluating teacher performance in public schools. An (anticipatable) bias toward New York news was detected.

We brought our formulations to the table and began to piece them together. Patterns emerged, we found many of the stories that made the Front Page section of The Times to cover stand-alone issues that were not followed up in subsequent editions of The Times. This suggests a leaning toward sensationalism, however it must be remembered that we are looking at stories that made it to the front page. More systemic coverage likely appears in the 2,157 articles in the Education and US sections of the paper, but those fell outside the scope (and feasibility) of our study. We recognized that we were putting historically-relevant theories of education in relation to recent headlines in a single newspaper, and the project was worthy of our attention. If nothing else, we would learn what educational issues were popularized in 2010, and whether our intellectual forbears had any tools to predict and analyze them. (Rob)

Results

Charter Schools Remain the Dominant Alternative in Public School Reform

Charter schools seem to be both the target for President Obama’s “Race to the Top” competition and its funding incentive. America’s schools are falling behind in comparison to schools in other industrialized nations, thus forcing our country’s schools to compete. Charter schools represent an alternative to traditional public schools and may be the vessel by which the U.S. educational system progresses. However, there are mixed reviews regarding their overall effectiveness:

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.” [36]

Can charter schools substitute for conventional schools which are proven to be broken? Yes and no. Clearly, we must explore other options, and charters are a strong candidate for reform. Ineffective charter schools should probably be eliminated as quickly as failing public schools. There is little room left for error as it relates to improving schools in America. Diligent innovation is essential to improving the education atmosphere in schools, but it may come in conflict with the standardized curricula which dominate traditional public schools. This is where charter schools have an advantage: while they are held to national standards, they are at liberty to deviate from the “established norm” concerning curricula. (Willie)

Obama’s “Race to the Top” Challenge is Debuted

But no Major Changes have been made to “No Child Left Behind”

During 2010, there were only two articles focused on proposed changes to “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB), the Education Law signed by George W. Bush in 2002. The first emphasized the Obama administration’s plans to eliminate a 2014 deadline for compliance with NCLB standards, as well as proposed changes to make NCLB more like the “Race to the Top” which was a federal grant program created by the 2009 Federal Stimulus Bill [7]. While NCLB had introduced measures to evaluate the nation’s schools, the proposed changes would create a more nuanced system of evaluation. Specifically, Obama proposed to replace “the law's pass-fail school grading system with one that would measure individual students' academic growth and judge schools based not on test scores alone but also on indicators like pupil attendance, graduation rates and learning climate” [16]. Obama’s blueprint for reform was scuttled by the mid-term elections during Fall 2010, which ultimately left the proposals in legislative limbo.

On March 29, 2010, the Department of Education announced that only two states would win grants from the first round of “Race to the Top.” The contest “favored states able to gain support from 100 percent of school districts and local teachers’ unions for Obama administration objectives like expanding charter schools, reworking teacher evaluation systems and turning around low-performing schools” [28]. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was two relatively small states (Delaware and Tennessee) that could put together 100% support for the objectives, leaving the remainder more than $3 Billion to be dispensed later in the year and closer to the mid-term elections.

On August 24, 2010, the second-round recipients of Race to the Top grants were announced. The Times’ banner coverage focused on $696 million awarded to New York, and the lack of an award to New Jersey [71, 72]. New York had struck a compromise with teachers unions to increase the number of charter schools from 200 to 460, while also increasing state oversight of them [71]. New Jersey apparently would have won $400 million for its proposed reforms were it not for a simple clerical error, which had cost the state’s educational commissioner his job by the end of the week [72]. The other winners were Massachusetts, Hawaii, Florida, Rhode Island, Washington D.C., Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio, but this was not reported in the Front Page section of The Times.

Teachers Blamed for Failing Schools

In 2010, there was a consolidation of the opinion that teachers are culpable in failing schools. New York City Mayor Bloomberg and his Education Chief Joe Klein put pressure on teachers by branding them “incompetent” and pursuing litigation to legally fire some of the city’s 55,000 tenured teachers [10]. The New York Board of Regents considered allowing alternative programs such as “Teach for America” to become a path to teacher certification, which would be a huge blow to the 1,450 schools of education that currently certify teachers, while increasing competition with untenured teachers [32].

Simultaneously, one sees a trend toward testing existing teachers’ performance. A modeling system known as the value-added methodology was used to evaluate teacher performance on the basis of their effect on student test scores [73]. “The Department of Education made states with laws prohibiting linkages between student data and teachers ineligible to compete in Race to the Top” [73].

Billionaire capitalist Bill Gates began funding teacher evaluation programs in 2010, using value-added methods as a starting point [93]. The Gates’ Foundation methods involve scoring 24,000 hours of videotaped classroom teaching according to a point system. There remains, however, huge doubts about teacher evaluation in general. There are reports of teachers ranking high one year and low the following year, and of teachers with glowing reputations that perplexingly have received low ranks [98].

We see value in the developing practices of teacher evaluation. At the same time, we would like to recognize the social utility of unmeasurable efforts that teachers represent to our youth. Teachers have been the socio-emotional fulcrum holding lives together by piecemeal. As a society steeped in ideological hegemony, teachers have represented the proverbial glue of our young democracy. Though marginalized by the prevailing issues of our day, teachers (as a whole) have consistently demonstrated integrity without wavering in their duty to educate our children in mass. (Malik) Union leaders’ claim that “teachers are made the scapegoats” for failing schools [81]. The only way to balance a seemingly lopsided blame is for it to be shared. (Willie)

The Role of Unions and the Fate of Teachers

On October 15, Trip Gabriel wrote in The Times that “what many reformers see as the chief obstacle to lifting dismal schools: unions that protect incompetent teachers” and that “for the first time, Democratic president, Barack Obama, is espousing ideas that have been anathema to teachers’ unions – chiefly, encouraging school choice through charter schools and holding teachers accountable for student learning” [81]. If rooting out incompetent teachers is the aim then unions must cooperate or face the wrath of the legislature which has the power to collapse union strangle hold of power over states. (Will)

Discussion

Is the Public School System supposed to function like a Business Sector?

When speaking of the problems of the public education system, we hear a lot about finances. Lawmakers never stop to consider that the financial problems are not the issue. The problem is that what is being taught in these institutions is outdated: thus it cannot possibly be interesting or helpful to our youth. Somehow we continue to associate all school problems with mismanagement of funds instead of people and structures. Then, in order to maintain access to funding, schools dumb down their tests in order to advance the perception that students are learning something. (Erick)

The financialization of education can severely complicate the agenda of education. Incentive-laden programs such as “Race to the Top” seem to only engage teachers and administrators in a process of meeting arbitrary standards to secure employment and acquire funds [55]. I believe programs like this only deprive students of quality education and reduce student to mere products. Schools have become factories that have minimal safety standards so the produced products (do not come out defective) do not harm the consumers namely other businesses and factories. (Earl)

For profit education companies are coming under fire. Stanley H. Kaplan of Kaplan University along with other for-profit education companies came under federal investigation for deceptive practices ranging from recruitment to graduation rates [85]. (Will) Student loans are big business—Sallie Mae offered $22 Billion in loans in 2009, and Obama wanted to overhaul the loan system to hand more of the money to students. Unsurprisingly, the banks called the proposed measure a “government takeover.” However, Sallie Mae does not have any problem with earning interest on loans they originate with tax-dollars. In 2009, $80 Million went to subsidize student loans originated by Sallie Mae, who then earned debt interest on the loans with almost no risk [8]. (Rob)