| 来源类型 | Article |
| 规范类型 | 评论 |
| Charter school media coverage has grown more negative the past 10 years | |
| Frederick M. Hess; Jenn Hatfield; Kelsey Hamilton | |
| 发表日期 | 2016-08-08 |
| 出版年 | 2016 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Where education once seemed an oasis of bipartisanship, it’s become increasingly heated and partisan in the past few years. Charter schools are emblematic of where things stand. Donald Trump gave a shout-out to school choice and its potential to “rescue kids from failing schools” as he accepted the 2016 Republican nomination for president, one of the few domestic policy issues he explicitly mentioned. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has been much more measured on the campaign trail, stating last November that “Most charter schools — I don’t want to say every one —but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids. Or, if they do, they don’t keep them.” This debate plays out against the backdrop of a public that has become much more supportive of charter schools over the past decade. In the 2015 Gallup poll of attitudes toward education, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they supported charter schools and just 25 percent opposed them. That represented a marked change from the 49-41 split reported in 2005. Strikingly, media coverage has gotten substantially more negative on charter schools even as public opinion has grown more positive. In a new study, we examine how the tenor of charter school coverage has changed over the past decade, analyzing hundreds of articles from four different media outlets in 2005 and 2015: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Education Week and LexisNexis (a database of mostly smaller, regional newspapers). “We find that media coverage of charter schooling has become more opinionated and more negative over the past decade.” We find that media coverage of charter schooling has become more opinionated and more negative over the past decade. In 2005, over 70 percent of articles addressing charter schools were neutral in tone, compared to barely half in 2015. Of the articles that reflected a discernible slant, a slight majority were positive in 2005, while two-thirds were negative in 2015. Considering each outlet individually, The New York Times, The Washington Post and LexisNexis coverage all became more negative over time. Not only have outlets taken stronger stances on charter schools, but the share of opinion pieces on the subject skyrocketed, nearly tripling between 2005 and 2015. In 2005, those pieces leaned positive, but, by 2015, they were more likely to be negative than positive. While this negative shift in charter school reporting and editorializing is not immense, it’s clear that the major media has become more critical over time. What’s particularly intriguing about this shift is that it occurred while public opinion was becoming dramatically more positive about charter schooling. What’s not clear is what to make of all this. Does the fact that public opinion and major media coverage point in opposite directions speak to the limits of print media influence? Or does it suggest that the public might be even more enthusiastic about charter schooling if not for a press that’s mostly skeptical? Or perhaps that media coverage focuses on national trends in charter schooling, while parents and students focus attention on their local schools? To make sense of these shifts, our next brief will look into differences in national and local news while widening the scope of coverage. While it’s a safe bet that the Trump-Clinton contest this fall is not going to turn on questions of education policy, media perceptions and public support will greatly impact charter schooling over the next four years. And, in this election year and moving forward, it’s vitally important to explore the media’s take on issues of public policy and understand its role in the democratic process. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where Hatfield is a research associate in education policy and Hamilton is a research assistant in education policy. |
| 主题 | Education ; K-12 Schooling |
| 标签 | Charter schools ; K-12 education ; US Media |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/articles/charter-school-media-coverage-has-grown-more-negative-the-past-10-years/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/260983 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Frederick M. Hess,Jenn Hatfield,Kelsey Hamilton. Charter school media coverage has grown more negative the past 10 years. 2016. |
| 条目包含的文件 | 条目无相关文件。 | |||||
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