Some of my favorite ed bloggers, fresh from the AERA conference are chatting up the media and its limited use of (or for) ed research. Alexander Russo’s This Week in Education observes that ed research “isn’t much of a player” and bemoans how “journalism still avoids dealing with education research as much as possible and struggles to deal with it when there’s just no other escape.”
Having spent far more of my life in news than education, I wish I could be more sanguine about the potential for education reporters having a better grasp of education research. Every practical fact in contemporary journalism argues against it. Face it, ink-stained wretches are in wretched shape. Advertising revenues have fallen off a cliff, readers are defecting to the Web in boxcar numbers and the beat system, which allowed reporters to become truly informed experts, has ceased to exist even at elite publications (I’m old enough to remember when TIME, where I worked for several years, had reporters who covered education, religion, and law full-time).
The other factor that weighs against education research making more of a splash in the news is, frankly, interest. Sure research studies might be a gripping read for wonks, but the lay reader will expect what they’ve always expected–for some neutral arbiter to keep a finger to the wind and alert them when there’s a change in direction. Thus the bar for what’s considered newsworthy for the general reader when it comes to research is still set pretty high. Nothing new there.
A commenter on Russo’s blog hit the nail squarely on the head earlier this week when he wrote “Education writers have not the time or the inclination to report education research because it is most often irrelevant and removed from their daily reporting duties and impossible to sell to an editor who, in the newspaper industry these days, wants local, local, local. The education writers I work with are way too busy covering their districts and feeding the daily news beast to bother reading (much less report on) on the the latest “study” out of, say, Think Tank X.”
That’s not going to change anytime soon, but more to the point it’s not a problem. As Russo points out, there are a bevy of blogs that regularly post on research. It’s a remarkable flowering of mainstream access to data that simply didn’t exist even a few years ago. So to bloggers who bemoan the media’s lack of attention to ed research I can only suggest it’s not their role any more. It’s ours.
You are present at and a participating in an increasingly flat marketplace of ideas. If traditional media have less manpower, time, training and interest to wrestle with education research and policy that’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity. Take advantage of it.
A Solution in Search of a Problem
In “Education Policy, Academic Research, and Public Opinion,” by William G. Howell (When Research Matters, How Scholarship Influences Education Policy, Edited by Frederick M. Hess, Harvard Education Press, 2008), Howell states, “A number of scholars have shown that citizens who know less about a chosen policy are especially susceptible to persuasion.” Depending on the journalists own bias, “…journalists all too often conjure up controversy where it does not exist, focus on the personalities of the parties involved, look to vested interest groups for commentary, and give equal time and attention to two sides of an issue even when the preponderance of evidence suggests that only one is right.” [emphasis mine] Off the top of my head I can think of an example of a journalist seeking out a teacher who still insists on using the “Literacy Based” (whole word) reading instruction when it has been thoroughly discredited, as part of an article on the fallout from the Reading First scandal. Is the average, uninformed citizen going to be able to see beyond the obvious bias in that article?
Education is the most values-driven of enterprises. (See above, pg. 39) What the consumers of education research want is confirmation of their baseline values. Even when faced with empirical data contradicting their beliefs, the percentage of people willing to change their baseline beliefs is surprisingly low. (See above, Pg. 142) The job of journalist has become more than to inform; it all too often includes persuasion.
Still, if there was not an interest in education writing, why would there be an Education Writers Association? And if they are not writing about what we would hope they would write about, perhaps it is our duty to bring some piece of research to their attention as I did just today regarding the on-going debate about whether home-schooling parents should be required to be credentialed.
Yes, the challenges facing the modern-day education reporter is an opportunity for the education bloggers, but we need to make sure that we don’t end up just talking to each other.
The job of a journalist is persuasion? I’m not sure I agree, Morgan. The job of a journalist is to find a story that his or her reader will be interested in, and render it in an engaging and hopefully responsible way. That’s it, really. The First Amendment guarantees the right of a free press. But no person, fact or idea is guaranteed access to that free press.
“The job of journalist has become more than to inform; it all too often includes persuasion.”
“Has become,” not “is.” Bill Clinton had a problem with that, too. : ) And, *not* always, but “all too often,” stories are written in such a way as to persuade. Writing a story in a way that will engage the reader implies knowing who that reader (customer) is and what will, in fact, engage them. If the writer is going to engage the reader, they must do more than strictly inform.
Another obstacle to reporting on education research is that some of the research has a large barrier to entry — that is, the methods used are so complex and obscure that there aren’t many people who can truly understand exactly what the results indicate.