Folks in education policy and practice often obsess over whether pop-culture depictions of school life are accurate. But they aren’t, even when they try to be. How plausible is it, for example, that “Prez,” the hot-headed and impulsive rookie cop in HBO’s gritty drama The Wire, accidentally kills a fellow police officer during a botched undercover operation yet somehow still gets hired and finds redemption as a compassionate and dedicated Baltimore public school teacher?

Worse, when the favorite reforms and policy plays of education reformers are skewered by the entertainment-industrial complex, we react as though the takedown carries the weight of an executive order. When John Oliver did an anti-charter school exposé on HBO’s Last Week Tonight, it was as if he were not a comedian but the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow himself, who famously denounced Joe McCarthy on See It Now. When I asked one high-profile ed reformer why she was treating a comedy show as an existential threat to her work, she sternly replied, “This is where people get their news!” Well, then, people are fools.

This brings us to the latest pop culture artifact to inspire sturm und drang over the policy ramifications of its setting, characters, story arc, and political point of view. Abbott Elementary is a television sitcom created by Quinta Brunson, who also plays the lead as teacher Janine Teagues. The show, which premiered on ABC in December 2021, revolves around the daily lives of the teachers and staff of a fictitious public school in Philadelphia. It has been widely praised for its witty portrayal of life in an urban school, attracted millions of viewers, and won three Emmy awards.

The show is set in Abbott Elementary School, located in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia and beset by the standard litany of features associated in the public imagination with struggling inner-city schools: lack of funding, outdated equipment, and a staff that is overworked and underpaid. Despite these obstacles, the teachers and staff are (naturally) dedicated to making a difference in the lives of their students.

Brunson herself is aware of the limitations of her creation and seems almost embarrassed by the attention it’s received among educators. “I know it sounds bad, but a lot of people are like, ‘Wow, you did this thing to show how under-appreciated teachers are, to change the world,’” she said at a TV industry panel discussion last year. “Not really. I really just wanted to make a good workplace comedy.”

So, does Abbott Elementary get the details right?

No, of course not! Am I mumbling? It’s not an ethnography of an inner-city school; it’s a network sitcom, for Pete’s sake! Are you serious?! When the script requires teachers to talk to one another, which they do constantly, they don’t think twice about leaving their classrooms unattended. For all their complaining about never having time to prepare lessons, they spend an awful lot of time hanging out in the faculty lounge and chatting in the hallway. The main characters teach a range of grade levels, from kindergarten to the upper grades, yet somehow, they all seem to have the same lunch period. On staff development days, the room is filled with extras, suggesting the school has a large faculty. Yet when a charter school peels away some 3rd-grade students, Abbott’s 2nd grade teacher is forced to teach both grades in a single classroom. Children are little more than set dressing on Abbott Elementary and they only rarely speak (yeah, right). In my Bronx 5th grade classroom, I had students as old as 12 and 13, but some of the upper-grade Abbott kids look old enough to drive.

The show’s idea of a “disruptive student” is a child who calls out off-topic references to a TV show in class while his classmates are sitting in rapt attention to the teacher’s science lesson (on TV, teachers are still the “sage on the stage,” not the “guide on the side”). It’s the kind of mild misbehavior that calls for “planned ignoring” at best and likely wouldn’t even merit a teacher’s attention in an actual classroom, let alone become fodder for a storyline. The child is sent to the office of the principal, a vain, self-absorbed, and ineffective figure who commands little respect from her staff. When she sends the child back to class with a toy, the rest of the class erupts. That’s his punishment? Now they, too, want to be sent to the principal’s office.

OK, so that part is realistic. Nailed it.

A major plotline in the second season of Abbott Elementary involves a charter school that opens nearby. Naturally, this sent the commentariat into overdrive for an inevitable round of plumbing light entertainment for important political messages. The New Yorker devoted several pages in a March issue to a discussion of how Brunson’s “superb sitcom became an unabashed polemic against the privatization of a public good.”

Must we? Really? Very well, if we are going to take our public-policy cues from a network sitcom and fact-check the script, let the record show that charter schools are public schools, not private; they do not hand-pick high-performing kids, nor can they kick them out for struggling academically. The Abbott crew mistakenly receives a box of textbooks meant for Addington, the gleaming new charter down the block run by Legendary Charter Schools. When they deliver the books to snoop on the upstart school, they run into a former Abbott teacher who was let go for kicking a student. “I don’t do that anymore. Anger management,” the charter-school teacher chirps brightly, then adds in a conspiratorial stage whisper, “At a charter school there’s a lot less oversight in the hiring process. So, it’s been pretty sweet.”

Abbott Elementary does drop the occasional hint that traditional public education, too, is something less than an unalloyed civic good. When Brunson’s earnest and adorable main character, Janine, wants to paint her classroom to match the look and feel of Addington, the principal stops her because that would run afoul of the rules laid down by “the Philadelphia Department of Education, Animal Shelters, and Traffic.” A veteran teacher tells a young colleague to take down a schedule he created to ensure the school’s new curriculum gets taught. “Being a teacher is being asked to do the impossible, year after year,” she tells him, “and our only solution is to show up every day and try our best.” It’s meant to be maternal advice, but it could just as easily land as low expectations. On Reddit, real-life teachers have expressed disapproval at the sins the show commits against the science of reading: the three-cueing method of instruction debunked in Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast lives on at Abbott Elementary.

The most unrealistic touch of all is Abbott itself. If neighborhood public schools were filled with the funny, likable, and dedicated teachers of Abbott Elementary, there would be no charter schools. Addington is filled with new books, French classes, a new computer lab, and more—in contrast to Abbott, which (you know how this sentence is going to end) is “underfunded,” not badly managed. Still, if charter advocates are looking for retribution for the sins committed against their sector by Abbott Elementary, they can start and finish with the Philadelphia public school system, where only a third of students in grades 3 to 8 met reading standards in the 2021–22 school year. And that was robust compared to math, where just 17 percent were up to snuff. According to data released in May by the district, three out of four Philly schools met between zero and 33 percent of their academic targets for the school year, which is no laughing matter.

Abbott Elementary plays to the conventional notions of those outside the edusphere and mines for laughs many of the standard myths and homilies of teaching. The city predicts the prison population based on reading performance. Barbara, a wise veteran, tells her young and earnest colleagues, “Your students can either fear you or respect you.” Sending a kid to the principal’s office makes a young white teacher, an awkward and clueless newbie whom savvy viewers will recognize as a Teach For America tintype, feel like “the mayor of White Guiltsylvania.”

But don’t blame the lack of sophistication on Brunson and company. They’re actors, writers, and comedians, not ed policy people. They’ve created a slight but amusing enough workplace comedy whose major faults lie not in its portrayal of an urban elementary school, but in the irritating tics TV viewers have come to associate with other workplace comedies, such as The Office, on which it’s modeled: the “mockumentary” style of rapid shifts and zooms, and characters breaking the fourth wall and shooting knowing glances at the camera to land weak jokes that even the writers seem to know merit more smirks than belly laughs.

As a kid, I watched an ungodly amount of television. Columbo and The Streets of San Francisco made detective work look fascinating. And every Saturday night, Emergency! made working as a paramedic seem like one exciting adventure after the next. Welcome Back, Kotter, though, didn’t make me want to be a teacher. The “Sweathogs” in that sitcom’s remedial ed classroom reminded me a little too much of the tough kids who mocked and intimidated me in metal shop. The point is, a lot of us form our ideas about various occupations from television shows—and most of these impressions are far from realistic.

But television is meant for entertainment, not elucidation. And know—as always—that when those of us in the education arena argue over whether a TV show is true-to-life or not, accurate or mythologizing, it’s a telltale sign of motivated reasoning: “Abbott Elementary reminds me so much of the teachers I know!” (Read: pay us more). “That’s not what it’s like at all!” (Read: open more charter schools). It’s just a television show. If every district-run school in Philadelphia were like Abbott Elementary, you wouldn’t put your kid in a charter. Or teach in one.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of How the Other Half Learns (Avery, 2019).

The post Does <em>Abbott Elementary</em> Get Teaching in an Inner-City Public School Right? appeared first on Education Next.

The post The Locus of K–12 Coverage During the Pandemic, and After appeared first on Education Next.

Over the past couple years, career and technical edu­cation has garnered a lot of attention. Politico reported that 49 states and Washington, DC, enacted 241 career and technical education–related laws, executive actions, and budget provisions in 2017. [1] The National Governors Association has tagged career and technical education as one of its 12 priorities, and Jobs for the Future has observed that career and technical educa­tion “has become the ‘next best thing’ in high school reform.” [2] A 2018 AEI study found that career and tech­nical education was the only education issue a majority of gubernatorial candidates supported. [3] Meanwhile, a 2018 analysis reported that the number of high school students concentrating in career education rose 22 percent, to 3.6 million, during the past decade. [4]

All this raises a big question, given education’s long experience with fads and shifting sentiment: Is the boom in career and technical education one more fad, or does it reflect something more substantial? That answer mat­ters for how much attention this push deserves from educators, parents, and policymakers.

In a stab at addressing this question, we examined the media attention devoted to career and technical educa­tion over the past two decades—and how that compares to the attention devoted to other popular 21st-century education reforms.

We used the search engine LexisNexis (a database of news articles from national and international media outlets) to identify the number of articles each year that mentioned career and technical education and, for comparative purposes, other related terms. We searched for “career and technical education” rather than “CTE” to not inadvertently include articles about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that has received extensive coverage for its impact on former football players’ health.

In all cases, we searched for articles in the LexisNe­xis category “US Publications,” a compilation of major US media sources.5 While that LexisNexis category is comprehensive, it is not exhaustive. For example, blogs and some education-specific media, such as Edu­cation Week, are not included. The exclusion of special­ized outlets helps ensure that the results are a pretty good gauge of how much attention the relevant issues received across the broad sweep of US media.

Since 1998, the number of articles mentioning career and technical education has increased more than a hundredfold, as displayed in Figure 1. Since 2004, media mentions have grown over tenfold, and they have doubled since 2012. In short, the cover­age devoted to career and technical education has exploded during the past two decades.

This heightened interest in career and techni­cal education is part of a larger trend, which entails increased attention to skills training and workforce preparedness (Figure 2). Indeed, media mentions of workforce development increased by a factor of 13 in the past two decades.

Meanwhile, other training-related terms that were once more common than career and technical educa­tion have not kept pace. In 1998, career training was more ubiquitous than career and technical educa­tion was, but it was surpassed by career and techni­cal education in 2004 and is now mentioned not even one-third as often. Vocational education was once mentioned 10 times more often than career and tech­nical education was, but starting about a decade ago, it plateaued and was surpassed by career and technical education. It seems safe to say that mentions of career and technical education have come at the expense of vocational education and career training; less clear is whether that shift has any substantive import or is mostly a question of branding.

To put coverage of career and technical education in context, Figure 3 shows the attention devoted to three of the 21st century’s most notable education reforms: No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Common Core, and the Obama-era push to overhaul teacher evaluation. At their peaks, No Child Left Behind and Common Core received three to five times as much media attention as career and technical education garnered last year. At its height in 2012, teacher evaluation received 50 percent more attention than career and technical education received last year. Yet, while it has not come anywhere close to those peaks, career and technical education has shown a markedly different public pro­file than these other reforms—all of which exploded to public consciousness over a span of three or four years and then declined. Career and technical edu­cation, on the other hand, has seen a long, dramatic, and uninterrupted build over an extended period of time. Given this long pattern and an attendant lack of controversy, career and technical education seems unlikely to experience the rapid declines in public interest endured by these more polarizing reforms.

Career and technical education even outpaces the attention devoted to other familiar education improvement strategies (Figure 4). For instance, one of the more high-profile education reforms of the past two decades has been school vouchers. From 1998 to 2008, media mentions of school vouchers significantly exceeded those of career and technical education. Over the past decade, however, career and technical education caught up to and then surpassed attention devoted to vouchers. This is noteworthy given that vouchers have long been the kind of controversial issue that attracts press attention, while career and tech­nical education has tended not to evoke such strong emotions. Meanwhile, whereas attention to career and technical education was once indistinguishable from that shown for other long-standing enthusiasms, such as school turnarounds, personalized learning, and 21st-century skills, career and technical education has steadily distinguished itself over the past 10–15 years.

Mostly out of curiosity, and partly to get a little per­spective on how much attention these tallies actually represent, Figure 5 compares the mainstream US media mentions of career and technical education to those of some recognizable pop culture figures. Over the past five years, for instance, career and technical edu­cation has held its own against Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth while generally outdistancing celebrity Kim Kardashian and two-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) Steph Curry. Indeed, career and technical edu­cation’s press mentions outpaced Kardashian’s in four of the past five years and Curry’s in all five—including both of his MVP campaigns.

Takeaways

Given the ebbs and flows of education reform, it is useful to closely observe the evolution and public fate of various education enthusiasms—both to help see where things are going and to make sense of how we got here. In the case of career and technical education, such scrutiny suggests a few things.

First, and most obviously, career and technical education’s prominence has increased steadily and significantly over two decades. What is not so clear is whether this reflects the emergence of something new or the (seemingly successful) rebranding of the famil­iar idea of vocational education. Notably, mentions of vocational education have not budged during the past decade, while interest in career and technical educa­tion has taken off.

Second, this increased interest in career and tech­nical education is part of a broader growth in the prominence of training and workforce development. Regardless of the reason for this growth—whether economic anxiety or disenchantment with college for all or a simple evolution in public taste—career and technical education advocates are making their case at a propitious time for career-centric education.

Third, career and technical education’s rise has been unusually consistent and long-running when compared to other 21st-century education reforms and is espe­cially notable for an idea that generates little contro­versy. After all, the reforms that have garnered much more notice than career and technical education, in gen­eral, rapidly retreated after being catapulted to prom­inence. Meanwhile, even seemingly popular reforms (such as school turnarounds, personalized learning, and 21st-century skills) have failed to gain nearly as much fanfare as career and technical education.

It seems a good bet that career and technical education’s gradual build will give it more staying power than other contested, high-profile 21st-century reforms. For better or worse, career and technical education appears poised to be a focal point in the post-NCLB, post–Common Core world.

Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. RJ Martin is a research assistant in education policy studies at AEI.

Notes:

1. Kimberly Hefling, “States Embrace New Career and Technical Education Policies,” Politico, January 26, 2018, https://www. politico.com/newsletters/morning-education/2018/01/26/states-embrace-new-career-and-technical-education-policies-084330.

2. National Governors Association, “Policy Positions,” https://www.nga.org/policy-positions/; and Jobs for the Future, “10 Equity Questions to Ask About Career and Technical Education,” February 13, 2018, https://www.jff.org/points-of-view/10-equity-questions-ask-about-career-and-technical-education/.

3. Frederick M. Hess and Sofia Gallo, “What Do Would-Be Governors Have to Say About Education,” American Enterprise Insti­tute, February 21, 2018, https://www.aei.org/publication/what-would-be-governors-say-about-education/.

4. Michelle Hackman, “Vocational Training Is Back as Firms Pair with High Schools to Groom Workers,” Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/vocational-training-is-back-as-firms-pair-with-high-schools-to-groom-workers-1534161601.

The post Is Career and Technical Education Just Enjoying Its 15 Minutes of Fame? appeared first on Education Next.

• This report analyzes every article on the 2018 teacher strikes published by five national newspapers

• The framing of teacher walkout coverage was remarkably impartial, with 56 of 59 article headlines and leads displaying no lean toward one side over another.

• However, articles quoted people in a way that was more one-sided. Over 80 percent of quotes from teachers, parents, and students supported the strikes.

• The coverage often failed to present all the relevant perspectives, such as the thoughts of families affected by the strikes. Of the 254 quotes published, only 5 percent came from an affected parent or student.

• The coverage also neglected to give readers a clear understanding of teacher compensation. Just 15 percent of articles quantified teacher health care benefits, 3 percent quantified pensions, and 2 percent compared teacher salaries to the relevant state’s median household income.

During spring 2018, tens of thousands of teachers in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, and North Carolina walked out of their schools. These teachers were angry about pay, school funding, proposed benefit changes, and more. The walkouts attracted extensive media attention across the land; that coverage has helped shape public understanding of the strikes and any political impact. With that in mind, this report examines how five national newspapers (the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today) covered the strikes.

Specifically, we examined how stories about the strikes were framed, who was quoted in those stories, and what information about teacher compensation was provided to readers. Using the search engine LexisNexis (a database that collects news articles from national and international news outlets), we identified all the stories these newspapers published on the walkouts between February 15 (just before the first walkout in West Virginia) and June 1 (after the last major walkout ended in May).

In all, we examined 59 news stories. The New York Times published 17 articles on the walkouts; the Wall Street Journal, 16; the Washington Post, 13; the Los Angeles Times, 10; and USA Today, 3. Twenty-six of the articles focused specifically on the West Virginia walkout, 11 on Oklahoma, 5 on Arizona, and the rest on less-prominent walkouts or on multiple states.

How Were News Stories Framed?

Headlines and lead paragraphs are important in determining the tenor of news coverage. Consequently, we analyzed whether the headlines and leads (the first three paragraphs) of each article endorsed or rejected the strikers’ position.

Of the 59 headlines on the walkouts, 56 displayed no tilt toward either the strikers or their critics, as illustrated in Figure 1. For example, an impartial February 22 Wall Street Journal story simply stated, “West Virginia Teachers Go on Statewide Strike.” [1]

Using the same approach, we analyzed the articles’ leads. As shown in Figure 2, 56 of 59 leads showed no partiality, closely mirroring the tenor of the headlines. For instance, one impartial February 27 New York Times story began, “A teachers’ strike that ground public schools to a halt across West Virginia is set to end on Thursday, a week after it began.” [2]

In sum, major newspapers were remarkably impartial when framing stories on the 2018 teacher strikes. Therefore, it is well worth examining what else we can learn about media coverage of the walkouts.

Did the Coverage Favor Some Voices over Others?

When journalists write articles about something like the teacher strikes, a considerable part of the story is which voices are heard. That means it matters greatly whom they interview and then whom they quote.

After all, reporters had an array of parties and perspectives they could quote while covering the walkouts. There were teachers who wanted higher pay. There were small-government advocates concerned about the cost of tax increases. There were parents who had to make day care arrangements for their children because the walkouts closed their schools. There were union leaders who strongly endorsed the strikes. Given the many voices involved, which ones were more evident in the coverage?

To address this question, we tallied all quotes attributed by name in the 59 articles, identifying 170 individuals who were quoted 254 times. (The numbers do not match because some individuals were quoted on multiple occasions.)

Who Was Quoted? Those quoted in the stories fell into five major categories: teachers, union leaders, state and local officials, academics and advocates, and parents and students.

As Figure 3 displays, teachers supplied about 28 percent of the 254 quotes published, union leaders 24 percent, and state and local officials 31 percent. Notably, parents and students affected by the walkouts provided just 5 percent of the quotes. [3]

What Was Said? Perhaps as important as who is quoted is what they are quoted as saying. On that score, we tallied how many of the 254 quotes supported the walkouts, how many were critical, and how many took no position. [4]

In one example of a pro-strike quotation, Noah Karvelis (an organizer of the Arizona strike) was quoted as saying, “If we maintain the status quo, that is way worse than missing a couple of days of school. The biggest disservice any of us could do for our students right now is to not act in this moment.” [5] On the other hand, in a representative anti-strike quotation, Jim Segar (an Arizona physical education teacher) was quoted as saying, “You can’t get everything at once after years of neglect. I think people would be crazy to walk out or strike now.” [6]

As Figure 4 shows, 60 percent of the quotes were pro-strike, roughly a quarter were neutral, and 14 percent were negative.

The pro-strike/anti-strike balance of quotes across the key stakeholder groups is of interest. Among union leaders, more than 80 percent of the quotes were pro-strike, and none were critical of the walkouts. The quotes of government officials were mixed, with 24 percent pro-strike, 43 percent neutral, and 32 percent anti-strike. Among academics and advocates, just 10 percent of the quotes were pro-strike, while two-thirds were neutral and 24 percent negative.

The articles examined had 72 quotes from teachers. As Figure 5 depicts, the teachers’ quotes were almost uniformly pro-strike, with 86 percent of them in favor and just 1 percent opposed.

As noted earlier, parents and students were seldom quoted; they contributed only 12 of the 254 quotes. Of those dozen quotes, the vast majority were pro-strike, while just two were negative (Figure 6).

How Much Context Was Included When Depicting Teacher Compensation?

The issues surrounding the teacher walkouts were complex. Given that strong claims about school spending, work conditions, and teacher pay were at the heart of the strikes, reporters routinely sought to provide needed context. The question is whether the coverage gave readers the whole picture of teacher compensation. After all, salary is the most significant component of teacher compensation, but it is accompanied by several other significant, costly employment benefits.

Which Kinds of Compensation Were Included in the Coverage? We tallied the number of articles that mentioned four different components of teacher compensation: salary, health care benefits, pension benefits, and leave time (including a shorter-than-average work year).

Figure 7 displays how the coverage addressed these four components, in terms of whether each was mentioned (the blue bars) or quantified (the orange bars). Of course, mentions of a benefit include (but are not limited to) instances in which that benefit was quantified.

A story was deemed to have mentioned a benefit if even a single sentence alluded to it (which means the results inevitably overestimate the amount of meaningful context provided). For instance, we counted an April 20 Wall Street Journal story as having mentioned pensions because it included the single line, “Strikes have cropped up in states where teacher salaries have fallen most sharply since the 2008–2009 recession, prompted in part by a revenue squeeze as states are forced to spend more on health-care and retirement programs.” [7] The blue bars in Figure 7 show that every story mentioned teacher salaries but that less than half mentioned health care benefits, barely a third mentioned pension plans, and none mentioned leave time.

To get a more substantive sense of how much context stories provided, we also examined how many articles attempted to quantify the value of the benefit in question. The orange bars in Figure 7 denote the percentages of articles that offered some sense of the amounts involved. For example, an April 2 New York Times story sought to quantify the salary figure in question, reporting, “Last week, the Legislature in Oklahoma City voted to provide teachers with an average raise of $6,000 per year, or roughly a 16 percent raise, depending on experience.” [8]

As Figure 7 shows, 98 percent of articles quantified the value of teacher salaries. Yet the coverage rarely conveyed the value of other benefits. Just 15 percent of articles quantified the value of teacher health benefits, and barely 3 percent sought to give a sense of teacher pension value. Meanwhile, no story tried to quantify the amount or value of teacher professional leave or teachers’ shorter-than-average work year.

How Did Stories Help Make Sense of Teacher Pay? While the coverage rarely referenced benefits, it always mentioned teacher salaries. Given that, we looked at how often the coverage used various comparisons to help readers make sense of the many claims regarding teacher pay.

News coverage routinely compared teacher salaries to those in other states, typically by noting where a given state ranked nationally in terms of pay (Figure 8). More than two-thirds of articles included that kind of comparison. At the same time, less than half the articles actually provided the relevant state’s average teacher salary. And only 2 percent of articles noted how a state’s average teacher salary compared to that state’s median household income.

Takeaways

In this report, we seek to better understand how major newspapers covered the 2018 teacher strikes. A close look suggests, generally speaking, that the press did an admirable job of framing its coverage impartially, tended to emphasize pro-strike voices, and could have done a vastly better job providing important contextual information that could help readers make sense of the strikes. Five takeaways in particular deserve elaboration.

First, the framing of walkout coverage was remarkably impartial. In almost no case did either the headlines or the leads of articles overtly favor one side in the disputes. This is heartening to see, given concerns about whether the media can report objectively on contentious issues.

Second, the coverage hardly ever quoted parents and students affected by the strikes. Of 254 total quotes published, fewer than 5 percent came from an affected parent or student. In fact, just 14 percent of the stories covering the walkouts featured a single quote from an affected parent or student.

This omission is striking because families were the largest group impacted by the walkouts—in Arizona alone, over 800,000 students were affected—and bore the brunt of the disruptions. [9] Whatever families thought of the strikes, positive or negative, was obviously important. Yet, while families were a huge part of the story, one could read extensively about the strikes and never hear their perspective.

Third, the quotes exhibited a seemingly pro-strike tilt. While 60 percent of all quotes supported the strikes and just 14 percent were anti-strike, opinion appears to have been more mixed than this ratio suggests. For instance, more than 80 percent of the parents and students quoted were pro-strike, but a 2018 Education Next poll showed that 53 percent of the general public supported teachers’ right to strike—and one-third rejected it. Public opinion toward the strikes was positive—but much less so than the coverage seemed to suggest [10]

Similarly, while 86 percent of teachers’ quotes were pro-strike, that figure also appears high. Indeed, even the pro-strike Arizona Educators United claimed that only 78 percent of Arizona teachers were pro-strike. [11] Setting aside the strike question, only 76 percent of teachers nationwide think teacher pay should be higher. [12] Again, that is quite supportive, but less so than the quotes indicated—and this is just on the general question of pay, not the more contentious question of whether a given strike or walkout is a good idea.

In other words, it appears that the selection of sources denied readers the chance to more fully understand anti-strike perspectives.

Fourth, the coverage generally did a poor job addressing the non-salary components of teacher compensation. After all, while 98 percent of articles referenced the value of teacher salaries, salary is not the whole of teacher compensation. The generosity of teacher health care benefits and pensions is a major issue in discussions of school spending and teacher pay.

Yet, less than half the articles even mentioned health care benefits, and barely a third mentioned pensions. Just 3 percent of stories obliquely referenced the value of teacher pensions, and not a single one mentioned teacher vacation time or the length of the teacher work year. The point is not that such information points a particular direction on teacher pay but that it is essential to help readers reach their own judgments about the merits of teacher demands.

Finally, the coverage almost uniformly failed to help readers reach their own conclusions about the state of teacher pay—the central issue of the teacher walkouts. Half the stories did not even include the pertinent average teacher salary. Meanwhile, just 2 percent of articles compared teacher pay to the state’s median household income. Especially in financially stressed states, it was potentially relevant that, in some cases, the average teacher was already earning more than the state’s median household. [13] At the least, readers benefit from having some sense of how teacher pay compares to the income of the households that would fund any boost in their pay.

After all, while a 2018 Education Next poll reported that two-thirds of the public supports higher pay for teachers, that figure falls to 49 percent when respondents are informed how much teachers in their state already earn. [14] Regardless of where one stands on teacher pay increases, this kind of information is clearly relevant to public deliberation.

Newspapers deserve commendation for their impartial framing of the stories. At the same time, the selection of quotes raised some grounds for concern, and a remarkable lack of information about teacher compensation meant that stories lacked crucial context. In the end, these flaws appear to have injected a subtle but important pro-strike bias into the coverage. But with the possibility of more strikes looming, the press should have plenty of opportunities to do better.

Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies and a resident scholar at AEI. RJ Martin is a research assistant in education policy studies at AEI.

Appendix A. Examples of Coding Methodology

The following tables contain examples illustrating how the headlines, leads, quotes, and information from news articles were coded in the analysis.

Table A1. Examples of Article Headlines with a Pro-Strike, Impartial, or Anti-Strike Tenor

Source: Authors.

Table A2. Examples of Article Leads with a Pro-Strike, Impartial, or Anti-Strike Tenor

Note: There were no leads with an anti-strike tenor.

Source: Authors.

Table A3. Examples of quotes from Articles with a Pro-Strike, Impartial, or Anti-Strike Tenor

Source: Authors.

Table A4. Examples of an Article Mentioning Teacher Benefits

Source: Authors.

Appendix B. List of Articles Analyzed

We searched LexisNexis in May–June 2018 for news articles (excluding blog posts and op-eds) specifically focused on the 2018 teacher strikes, published between February 15 and June 1. We searched using keywords such as “teacher,” “strike,” and “walkout” and various combinations of those keywords.

Note that article headlines and publication dates from LexisNexis reflect the print versions of the article and may vary from online versions of the article.

LexisNexis only includes abstracts of Wall Street Journal articles. So to ensure that we had a comprehensive collection of articles, we also searched (using the same criteria as described above) directly on the Journal’s website.

Notes:
1. Kris Maher, “West Virginia Teachers Go on Statewide Strike,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/ articles/west-virginia-teachers-go-on-statewide-strike-1519309185.

2. Jess Bidgood, “West Virginia Teachers’ Strike Ends with a Promise to Raise Pay,” New York Times, February 27, 2018, https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/us/west-virginia-teachers-strike-ends.html.

3. The “parents and students” included in this category were not also on teaching staff, a union leader, a government official, or an academic or advocate.

4. A quotation was scored as “pro-strike” if it contained an explicit endorsement of the strikes, supported the strikes’ goals, or was cited as a justification for the strikes. A quotation was scored as “anti-strike” if it explicitly condemned the strikes, criticized the strikes’ goals, or was cited as an argument against the strikes.

5. Dana Goldstein, “Arizona Teachers Vote in Favor of Statewide Walkout,” New York Times, April 20, 2018, https://www. nytimes.com/2018/04/20/us/arizona-teacher-walkout.html.

6. Goldstein, “Arizona Teachers Vote in Favor of Statewide Walkout.”

7. Michelle Hackman, “Arizona Teachers Vote to Go on Strike,” Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/ articles/arizona-teachers-vote-to-go-on-strike-1524227874.

8. Dana Goldstein, “Teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky Walk Out: ‘It Really Is a Wildfire,’” New York Times, April 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/us/teacher-strikes-oklahoma-kentucky.html.

9. Tawnell D. Hobbs and Michelle Hackman, “When Teachers Strike, Parents Face Dilemma,” Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-teachers-strike-parents-face-dilemma-1525080600.

10. Albert Cheng et al., “Public Support Climbs for Teacher Pay, School Expenditures, Charter Schools, and Universal Vouchers,” Education Next 19, no. 1 (Winter 2019), https://www.educationnext.org/public-support-climbs-teacher-pay-school-expenditures-charter-schools-universal-vouchers-2018-ednext-poll/.

11. Jonah Furman, “Massive Crowds Flood Capital as Arizona Teachers Stage First-Ever Statewide Walkout,” Labor Notes, April 27, 2018, http://labornotes.org/2018/04/massive-crowds-flood-capital-arizona-teachers-stage-first-ever-statewide-walkout.

12. Cheng et al., “Public Support Climbs for Teacher Pay, School Expenditures, Charter Schools, and Universal Vouchers.”

13. National Education Association, Rankings of the States 2017 and Estimates of School Statistics 2018, April 2018, http://www. nea.org/assets/docs/180413-Rankings_And_Estimates_Report_2018.pdf; and Gloria G. Guzman, “Household Income: 2016,” US Census Bureau, September 2017, https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2017/acs/acsbr16-02.pdf.

14. Cheng et al., “Public Support Climbs for Teacher Pay, School Expenditures, Charter Schools, and Universal Vouchers.”

The post How Did Major Newspapers Cover the 2018 Teacher Strikes? appeared first on Education Next.

The post The Newsroom’s View of Education Reform appeared first on Education Next.