Schools in the media: framing national standardized testing in the Norwegian press, 2004–2018

ABSTRACT

In the education sector, media outlets have been increasingly active in reporting on standardized testing. The purpose of this paper is to identify the most recurrent discursive frames used by the Norwegian regional and local press when informing their readers about national standardized testing, and to explore whether differences over time and across geographical localities exist in the pervasiveness of frames. Our analysis is guided by framing theory, and builds on a corpus of 3,046 articles that focus on national testing, published by 155 Norwegian regional and local newspapers between 2004 and 2018. The analysis identifies four different discursive frames within Norwegian press coverage, namely the frame of ‘performance’, ‘transparency and empowerment’, ‘misinterpretation and misuse’, and ‘criticism’. The four frames convey highly distinct causal and normative beliefs and realities about national standardized testing. While the dominance of the frames varies over time and across Norwegian counties, the frame of ‘performance’ is increasingly pervasive, something that potentially contributes to naturalize performative-oriented reporting and competition in education. The study highlights the importance of systematic media analyses to identify circulating principle beliefs on education, and of not limiting research to national newspapers in order to grasp geographical variation in media coverage.

KEYWORDS:

• National standardized tests
• media coverage
• frame analysis
• Norway
• educational accountability
• test-based accountability

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jorunn Møller, Mauro Moschetti, Guri Skedsmo, Antoni Verger and members of the ‘Globalisation, Education and Social Policies’ research group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

A full list of all newspapers and articles has been deposited and made available free of charge by the authors in the Zenodo Digital Repository of Documents. https://zenodo.org/record/4527481#.YCOUTGhKhaQ

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Of these distributions, 1.4 million included paid-for subscriptions, while nearly 300,000 distributions comprised free newspapers. For seven free newspapers, no data can be found on the number of distributions (Norwegian Media Authority, 2018).

2 The coalition was made up of the Labor Party, Socialist Left Party and the Centre Party. The appellative of ‘red-green’ refers to the party colors.

3 Even though school results remained hidden on the ‘School Portal’, anyone interested could request access to these data, following the Freedom of Information Act.

4 We included all types of contributions, so the corpus includes articles written by journalists, editorials and opinion and commentary articles.

5 As of January 2020, the former 19 counties were merged into 11 counties. However, as the former county distribution was in place during the analyzed time span, and the official data on the geographical distribution of newspapers relies on this county distribution, we present the data for the 19 former counties.

6 Considering the size of the corpus, it was not possible to represent all of the analyzed articles. We therefore selected quotations that represent typical examples of commonly expressed statements. All quotations have been translated from Norwegian to English by the authors. We refer to each newspaper article by its article identifier.

7 Our analysis shows that, even though school results were not published on the ‘School Portal’, during this period, 619 articles of our corpus were presenting school comparisons and/or rankings. It was found that in 18 cases, school rankings were based on results presented in national newspapers, in 9 cases school results were provided by county/municipal authorities, and in 3 cases local newspapers requested school data following the Freedom of Information Act. In all other cases, the source of the school data was not provided.

8 In making this claim, no mention is made of the fact that, as highlighted in footnote 6, some media and municipalities reported school results during the years that they were not published on the ‘School Portal’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s ‘Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation’ [GA-680172 – REFORMED].