Media accounts of school performance: reinforcing dominant practices of accountability

Abstract

Media reportage often act as interpretations of accountability policies thereby making the news media a part of the policy enactment process. Within such a process, their role is that of policy reinforcement rather than policy construction or contestation. This paper draws on the experiences of school leaders in regional Queensland, Australia, and their perceptions of the media frames that are used to report on accountability using school performance. The notion of accountability is theorised in terms of media understandings of ‘holding power to account’, and forms the theoretical framework for this study. The methodological considerations both contextualise aspects of the schools involved in the study, and outline how ‘framing theory’ was used to analyse the data. The paper draws on a number of participant experiences and newspaper accounts of schools to identify the frames that are used by the press when reporting on school performance. Three frames referring to school performance are discussed in this paper: those that rank performance such as league tables; frames that decontextualise performance isolating it from school circumstances and levels of funding; and frames that residualise government schools.

Keywords:

• Accountability
• performativity
• newspaper representation of schools
• NAPLAN
• school performance

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the generous feedback on earlier drafts of this paper provided by Bob Lingard.

Notes on Contributor

Aspa Baroutsis is a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Education at the University of Queensland. Aspa’s research is focused on media constructs and public discourses about schools, teachers and students; underpinned by understandings of social justice and ‘voice’. Her current research is a longitudinal study that explores the media construction of school performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results in Australia. Aspa’s two most recent publications have been published in the British Educational Research Journal and Pedagogy, Culture and Society.

Notes

1. Since 2008, NAPLAN assessment has been administered to all Australian students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9, testing the four domains of reading, writing, language conventions (spelling, grammar and punctuation) and numeracy (NAP 2013).

2. IRSD is a general socio-economic index that summarises a range of information about the economic and social conditions of people and households within an area with a low score generally indicating relatively greater disadvantage (ABS – Australian Bureau of Statistics 2015).

3. ICSEA is a scale of socio-educational advantage. The values are calculated on a scale which has a median of 1000 and a standard deviation of 100. ICSEA values typically range from approximately 500 (representing extremely educationally disadvantaged backgrounds) to about 1300 (representing schools with students with very educationally advantaged backgrounds) (ACARA 2014).