Education on the media agenda

Photo: Alexa – Pixabay

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Eva Serra

The media tend to be drawn to issues that generate impact, novelty, or controversy. Corruption scandals or sexual misconduct—so prominent in our country’s current affairs of late—alongside accidents and disasters, unemployment and the labour market, inflation and consumption, housing, or the political agenda itself, routinely dominate the daily news filter we consume. Education, however, rarely does. And this is deeply troubling.

The concept of agenda-setting, which emerged in the 1970s from the work of Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, already showed how the hierarchy of news determined by the media shapes public opinion and even the political agenda itself, channelling which issues are deemed worthy of attention. Highlighting certain topics is just as influential as sidelining others: together, these choices mould our perception of reality, shape ideological stances, influence how we vote in elections, and determine which issues speak to us most directly as individuals and as a society. In turn, this allows those in power to place the spotlight on whatever best serves their priorities, while minimising matters that are more conveniently relegated to the background—or erased altogether. It is, in effect, a matter of turning the volume up or down on information, and in some cases muting it entirely, on the tacit assumption that what does not appear in the media does not exist. Something very similar happens with education. Poor results appear not to exist because they are barely discussed. Beyond the fleeting publication of headline figures whenever certain international reports are released, educational debate quickly dissipates, if it does not simply vanish. The historic decline of our students’ performance in mathematics, or their increasingly weak reading comprehension—two highly relevant competencies—are not issues of broad public interest that warrant much in the way of opinion pieces, in-depth analysis, or expert interventions on prime-time talk shows.

This media neglect of education has been widely examined. A range of academic and media studies seeking to explain this democratic anomaly point to several factors: the lack of journalists specialising in education; the difficulty of making academic research intelligible to a broad audience; constantly changing legislation and successive reforms that demand prolonged and technically complex monitoring; the limited interest education generates in public conversation; and the fact that teaching is a structural, slow-moving process whose results can only be measured in the long term. Theories such as news value further confirm that media priorities favour information that delivers immediate impact or controversy, whereas education lies at the opposite end of the spectrum. It is neither immediate nor socially combustible—one struggles to imagine a heated argument in a bar over which academic curriculum model has produced better results in East Asia. Education simply does not sell well in the battle for audiences: it generates few clicks and cannot compete with the scandals that populate the media agenda and provide effortless entertainment.

Yet it should not be forgotten that the health—or otherwise—of an education system directly shapes outcomes in areas that are very much media-friendly: unemployment and the labour market (higher educational attainment correlates with lower unemployment, better wages, and greater competitiveness); inflation and consumption (through higher purchasing power and disposable income); housing (with education acting as a driver of urban concentration or mobility); and, crucially, the political agenda itself and the democratic health of a country, which is closely tied to the critical capacity of both its representatives and its citizens.

Why, then, is there so little interest in reporting on education? Why has the political class failed, after forty-eight years of constitutional democracy, to reach a state-wide education pact? Why have eight education laws led only to a decline in the quality of our education system? Why have more than two thirds of teachers (68.5 per cent) at some point considered leaving the  profession leaving the profession? Why does 24 per cent of Spanish fifteen-year-olds fail to reach the minimum level in reading comprehension? Why are Spanish students of that age almost two academic years behind their Asian peers in mathematical competence? The list of questions could go on and on. If public opinion is not informed about the state of education in the country, it can hardly be expected to demand accountability. Education will not feature among the Spanish people’s top concerns, as measured by CIS surveys, and consequently it will not be treated as a political priority.

At present, what remains of genuine educational debate has largely migrated to the back rooms of social media. Some even argue that these platforms represent the last hope in a context where entrenched powers have encroached upon press freedom by dictating what counts as information and what is labelled disinformation, thereby hollowing out journalism’s essential functions: holding power to account, fostering pluralism, ensuring transparency, contributing to an informed citizenry, and fulfilling its own educational role in shaping public opinion. It is hardly reassuring, either, to observe how many journalists—acting as de facto opinion leaders—have closed ranks around the executive, creating a form of media cloning that mirrors parliamentary dynamics, which are not always a model of in-depth debate on matters of real consequence to citizens. Many political representatives, after all, view reality through the narrow lens of a four-year electoral cycle—far too short to accommodate the long-term perspective required by an issue as slow-burning as education.

A saying attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to Winston Churchill captures this well: “The politician thinks of the next election; the statesman thinks of the next generation”. Nowhere is this more applicable than in education—and perhaps what we lack, then, is not policies but statesmen.

In the meantime, hope lies in the fact that this civic backroom has come to stay. Teachers, grassroots initiatives, citizens, associations, and families—alongside the invaluable contributions of committed academics who research and publish, as exemplified by our free-access digital publication Educational Evidence—continue to fuel the necessary reflection on public education policy and to scrutinise critically how knowledge is transmitted in our schools. So that, ultimately, educational debate does not suffocate in silence. There is much still to be done—and it will be done.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons