Major forms of media get away with promoting a private-market agenda and targeting parents and lay-people because they are experts at couching their agenda in more palatable rhetoric such as "this broadcast is intended to address the needs of children and inform and enlighten the public about the current debates regarding education reform." While exploiting society's "commitment to equality of opportunity," the media is serving the needs of corporations by dictating public want, values and standards about prevailing issues in education.
The major outlets of news media suggest that new teacher evaluation methods are the solution to raising academic standards and are portrayed as what will help students, and teachers alike, grow intellectually and professionally. Television frames the need for educational reform by accenting the need and urgency for reform as an economic imperative. The spin of newspapers is much the same while a bit different.
On the topic of teacher evaluation and outcomes-based accountability, the medium of the newspaper has allowed more space to express controversy and apparent inconsistencies of this component of educational reform. Still, the espoused problem-solving strategy is narrated as a matter of accountability to be met by educators. All-in-all the dominant narrative of televison and print is the same though in news print, the degree to which evaluation of teacher effectiveness based on student test score data should be used enters the debate. It is mainly only in mass media sources that the voices of educators find space to enter into strong disagreement with using high-stakes testing scores in teacher evaluations.
Still critical voices to the debate on linking teacher evaluation to student test performance are missing. Ideology production is a process in which the media plays a key role. And so, the dominate narrative as an ideological product has no room for counter-hegemonic discourses; thus, voices on the margins like students, parents, community members and leaders, advocates and activists dare not get centered or better yet, heard via major news sources.
Research that particularly refutes the dominant narrative in media, the value-added component of measurement, is vastly ignored by newspaper and television. Additionally, major media outlets, in presenting the new teacher evaluation system that has gotten much of its steam from the Obama administration's Race to the Top program, are also not forthcoming about whose interests are really met by the new system of "accountability". The public, as already mentioned, is led to believe, by the media of course, that measuring teacher effectiveness by associating it with student test score data will ensure "objectivity" although, as we have learned, educational reform measures may in fact be the product of the subjective plan of corporations and billionaire backed Foundations. What all of this will mean for society remains to be seen. There is sure to be future research and analysis on the outcomes. In the meantime, as future educational policy researachers and educators we hope that our contributions to education can mitigate any negative backlash caused by such media propogation and strengthen any positive gains education reform may engender for the most disadvantaged subgroups of society.
NOTE: Please review the comments for additional analysis and opinion on the overall topic of teacher evaluation, student test performance and media.
I believe that teachers need to be held more accountable, and that the difference between having a poor teacher and having a qualified one can have a tremendous impact on a student’s academic success over the course of his or her educational experience. Finland, among other nations that have surpassed us academically, places strong emphasis on allowing only those who are elite in their class to become educators. Improving teacher evaluations is an excellent way to make sure we have only the best instructing our country’s students. However, I am wary of evaluation systems that concentrate solely on student test scores because I believe such scores are often unreliable and that teacher’s can only do so much in certain situations. I support evaluate systems that, like Impact, also involve observations by a trained educator and evaluator. I am open to the idea of basing evaluations solely on observations. Observations give evaluators a much better idea of teachers’ methods and competence in relaying information to their students. I also think any evaluation system should also include a plan for helping the teachers who are not performing as desired.
ReplyDeleteI like the fact that WFSM places strong emphasis on holding the adults accountable, but I feel that the documentary placed teachers and teachers unions in too negative a light. Unions have an important role in protecting teachers, a role that has been important historically. People who truly wish to help the situations should recognize that role and respect our nation’s educators. If those in favor of a new evaluation system presented their ideas as a way to assist teachers instead of a way to attack them, a more bipartisan effort for progress on the parts of reformers and educators would be more easily achieved.
Improving evaluations is a good idea not only for the students, but it will also benefit teachers. When they are properly evaluated, teachers who aren’t up to scratch receive the attention the need while teachers who excel can be recognized and rewarded. If teachers are not being as affective in the classroom as they should be, they have the right to know. Reliable and fair evaluations give teachers the opportunity to have that information and the resources they need to improve. I support unions’ skepticism because I feel it is important to protect teachers, but I feel that an innovative, just evaluation system would greatly benefit evaluators, students, and teachers.
The analysis of the discourse on new teacher evaluation measures in the media show how little information we often have in order to draw well-rounded conclusions. Just watching the TV and newspaper media, one is easily led to believe that teacher evaluations should have some form of objectivity, and if there is indeed a “value-added measurement” and there is research to confirm its effectiveness, then why shouldn’t we incorporate it?
ReplyDeleteIn reality, however, there is no objective way to evaluate teachers. Anyone in the teaching or education profession will contend with the claim that there is an “easy” way to determine effective and ineffective teachers. Through a undifferentiated, uniformly biased approach toward the subject matter, the media is using a form of indoctrination by closing the doors on our ability to use rationality, autonomy, or open-mindedness. Charlene Tan defines indoctrination as “the paralysis of one’s intellectual capacity, characterized by the inability to justify one’s beliefs and consider alternatives.” In a sense the media is propagating the kind of education it advocates: a non-critical, one-sided, and intellectually “paralyzed” approach to the realities of society and life.
It seems to me that the claim of objectivity is used as a pretext to get social cooperation for a more hidden agenda the public is left in ignorance about. The push toward privatization raises concern, not only because commercialized education has the tendency of narrowing access to learning for those of less financial means, but because the focus is on business and the reproduction of certain kinds of people rather than intellectual growth and development of the individual and the community (cf. Jean Anyon’s concept of “Social Reproduction”).
There is a glaring tendency for stakeholders and government leaders to believe – or to be led to believe – more in economics than in education. As shown in the struggle for the Little Village Lawndale High School in Chicago, IL, politicians did not hold up their end of the bargain and follow through with their promise of building a new school for the community. Their reasons were that investments in the new school would be in vain, since they assumed it would not bring about any social or economic changes and thereby “do little for the community”. Again, the public was held to believe that those in leadership were acting according to their best interest. Although the school was eventually built resulting from grassroots activism (literally a battle against maintaining such forms of social ignorance), this attitude shows a perspective on education that is strictly economical. This same mindset shines through the discourse on teacher evaluations: Including high-stakes testing scores in evaluation measures is cheaper, it ensures an “objective” one-size-fits-all measurement to create a standard and to keep producing in accordance with that standard.
There is a great danger in making economic growth and status the highest priority. It will inevitably lead to maximizing schools to produce people as social and economic “products” rather than independent citizens with a mind and intellect to participate in community and social discourse. Our country’s deep educational “crisis” is marked by the lack of attention given to the latter.