Bad Bad Not Good #2
The Tone of Education News in September 2021
Are things getting worse?
That’s the question I keep in the back of my head as I’m reading, watching or listening to the news. It’s the only way I can keep myself from sinking into a slough of despond.
It’s the question I hope you’ll ask yourself as you look at the above chart, which represents the tone of education news for the month of September.
This is a continuation of something I started in August. A breezy rationale for the exercise can be found here, along with my methodology, which, if your initial reaction to all of this is that it’s silly or unfair or misguided, I encourage you to read that original post. (A full list of the headlines is here.)
If you can’t be bothered, here’s the Cliff Notes version:
I grabbed every headline of every education story from 8 major news outlets that produce significant reporting (>10, sorry Wall Street Journal) for the month of September and categorized it as positive, negative or neutral based on its tone. This is a crude version of something called “sentiment mining.”
Headlines that included words/ phrases that evoked discord, anxiety, turmoil, stress, fear, anger or sadness = negative.
Headlines that included words/phrases that evoked comity, happiness, success or striving = positive.
Neutral is neutral.
Categorizations are (to the best of my ability) non-partisan and content-neutral.
I focus on headlines for two reasons: 1) I am not a computer and so could not have read and categorized the tone of every article; 2) As news consumers in 2021, we mostly read only headlines, and so our perception of the world is shaped by the headlines we scroll past daily.
I did not include local headlines. I also did not include cable news. I did not include higher education news.
I have an agenda. I’m an educator, but I’m also an optimist, a skeptic, and an evangelist for public schools. The coverage of schools simply does not comport with my own experience, nor the experience of many of my friends and family who also work in education or send their kids to school. Thus, the purpose of this exercise is to encourage people to place their own experience alongside the tone of education coverage and ask themselves, Are things so bad? Mindset matters. So does the truth.
Takeaways
The tone of education news is still very negative. Almost or more than 50% of every publication’s headlines, save one, were negative.
USA Today, at 72% negative, was by far the most negative.
Hechinger, at 33%, was the most positive. By luck or design, they achieved a perfect balance among positive, negative and neutral headlines.
A quarter of Education Week’s headlines were positive . . . but over half were negative.
Chalkbeat and Washington Post had no positive headlines. None. I triple-checked this, so if I missed something, please let me know. (One caveat: I did not include Chalkbeat’s coverage of its local “Communities:” Colorado, Chicago, Denver, Tennessee, Detroit, Indiana, etc.)
There appears to be a positive correlation between an outlet’s prestige and its negativity.
As compared to August
What do you notice about both charts? Anything surprising? Anything reassuring? Comments are open on this post, so please feel free to share your (civil) thoughts, or simply send me an email.
Interesting. Is the negative coverage mostly pandemic related (fighting over school closing, masks, vaccine mandates, CRT, exhausted teachers, school board riots)? And were things just as negative pre-pandemic (inflated graduation rates, low reading scores, dangerous schools, etc.)?