Accounting for mediatization in the era of individualized consequential accountability

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we report on our investigation of news coverage of accountability reform in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal during the implementation and assessment of New York’s Race to the Top-inspired teacher evaluation system. In systemically analyzing how these prominent media outlets narrated this contentious moment in educational history, this study seeks to identify major narrative features pertinent to the ideological and representational dimensions of teachers in the era of consequential accountability. Specifically, we examine character prevalence, the characterization of prevalent characters, and the valuations ascribed to prevalent characters. This analysis, thus, aims to account for the mediatization of accountability reform. Our findings suggest that both periodicals constructed a one-dimensional conflict between education reformers and resisters of the newly implemented accountability policies while narrating those most affected by the policies as passive bystanders to the ideological conflict being waged by those with more power and influence. This reductionist narrative gives voice to reformers’ audit-based notion of accountability while omitting the relational responsibility of educators – the form of accountability long associated with teachers’ work. In accounting for ideological and representational features of journalists’ narrative construction, we illuminate how prominent media outlets mediatize accountability policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Research
• critical analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Though these periodicals have the largest readership in the area, it is worth mentioning that they both cater to social elites. Focusing on a periodical such as New York Post may have produced different results.

2. We selected ‘Common Core’ – which refers to standards and tests, and thus has become a signifier of accountability reform – as the most appropriate search term because the evaluation system was not mentioned by name in the articles and because other precise terms such as ‘value-added measures’ would have significantly limited our sampling frame, further minimizing our ability to take a matched-pairs approach. We chose Fall 2013 because this is when the teacher evaluation program began. We chose Fall 2015 because this is when the U.S. Government overturned legislation supporting the reforms.

3. Because nuanced valuations are so few, we have not included these data in Table 2.

4. Because expressions of relational morality are so few, we have not included these data in Table 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Christopher Head

James Christopher Head is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at The University of West Georgia. He holds a PhD in Psychology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). His interests include the history of psychology, the philosophy of science, qualitative research, narrative analysis, and liberatory pedagogy. His recent research bridges the fields of psychology, sociology, and education and has been published in Critical Studies in Education (2019). He is a member of the Executive Committee of Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP).

Karyna Pryiomka

Karyna Pryiomka is a doctoral candidate in the Critical Social/Personality Psychology PhD program and has earned the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Graduate Certificate at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Drawing on the history of psychology and the philosophy of science, Karyna's research interests include the relationship between psychological assessments and education policy, validity theory, and the qualitative/quantitative divide in social science research. Her work on digital pedagogy has appeared in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (2017), while her theoretical work has been published by The Moscow State Herald. Series14. Psychology (2015). Karyna brings these interests and a blend of critical and digital pedagogies into her teaching of psychology and statistical methods courses at the City University of New York.