AJE Feature | An Echo of Education Reform Rhetoric by Mark Hlavacik and Jack Schneider

The full-length American Journal of Education article “The Echo of Reform Rhetoric: Arguments about National and Local School Failure in the News, 1984–2016″ by Hlavacik and Schneider can be accessed here.

Arguments about school failure have been a prominent feature of the public discussion of education for decades (Hlavacik, 2016), a reality which is somewhat perplexing. During the past half-century, access to public education has expanded, graduation rates have increased, and results on National Assessment of Educational Progress have been stable-to-positive (NCES 2016; 2017). Yet, while parents report that their children are receiving a good education, a majority now grade the nation’s schools as below average (Phi Delta Kappa, 2019). How have so many in the United States come to see the whole of their education system as lesser than the sum of its parts?

To investigate this question, we considered the circulation of arguments about school failure in a small set of prominent print journalism sources from 1984 to 2016. To do so, we couldn’t simply track the recurrence of a single argument. After all, schools can be portrayed as failing for variety of reasons—from low test scores to low teacher compensation, from a lack of discipline to a lack of accountability. Moreover, an argument about failure might be applied to one particular school, to the district that oversees it, or to the nation’s schools as a whole. Thus, tracking the rhetoric of school failure requires us to sift through a range of permutations, categorizing different kinds of arguments and seeking to make sense of how they work together. 

For our sample, we collected news items from five sources—The Boston Globe, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today—from 1984, just after the publication of A Nation at Risk, to 2016. Identifying arguments about failing schools in these sources, we organized them chronologically by four-year periods corresponding to presidential terms. 

To categorize the variations of school failure argument in these news sources, we used Stephen Toulmin’s (1958/2003) model of everyday political arguments. The Toulmin model identifies a set of essential features that all arguments share. They make a claim. That claim is supported by reference to some sort of data, which itself is supported by backing. Finally, the reasoning by which the data is said to permit the claim is called a warrant. Consider, for example, an excerpt from remarks made by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to the American Enterprise Institute on October 1, 2019:

“American education isn’t working for too many of them [students]. We’ve known this for more than 35 years. The devastating landmark report, “A Nation at Risk,” detailed the dire state of American education and warned us all: “History is not kind to idlers.” Well, if there’s any word to describe too many parts of American education—then and today—it’s “idle.” You’ve seen our Nation’s Report Card. You know what I mean. Two in three of our Nation’s 8th graders aren’t proficient in any core subject. We also know this: the United States ranks an embarrassing 24th in reading, 25th in science, and 40th in math in the world. You’ve heard me talk about these results before, and I don’t take any pleasure in reminding anyone about them. Yet there are many who pay lip service to the sorry state of affairs in American education, but offer more and more of the same as a solution. More spending, more regulation, more government” (DeVos, 2019).

Here DeVos claims that the nation’s schools are failing its students. The data she offers to support her claim come from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests. The backing for this data is the validity granted to the social scientific process of data collection employed by the OECD, which administers PISA. And the warrant for the argument—how poor test scores evidence the claim that the nation’s schools are failing—is the inefficient use of government resources.

For each school failure argument in our dataset, we applied Toulmin’s schema and found two distinct trajectories of school failure arguments: one for the nation’s schools and one for local schools.

Each of the news outlets ran stories making arguments about the state of the nation’s schools as a whole, as well as stories making arguments about the state of specific districts or schools. This allowed us to divide school failure arguments into two groups based on the claim they were making—a claim that applied either to the national level or the local level. When we tracked the intensity of the national and local arguments across time, we found something surprising: an echo.

Claims about national school failure increased in intensity first during the George H.W. Bush administration and then again during Bill Clinton’s second term. They then remained high through both George W. Bush’s terms in office and Barack Obama’s first term. At the local level, this pattern repeated—but with a two-term delay. Claims about local school failure increased first during Clinton’s second term in office and then rose again during George W. Bush’s second term and remained elevated for both of Obama’s terms in office.

Two questions emerged from this finding. How can we know that a rise in claims about national school failure are linked to a subsequent rise in claims about local school failure? In other words, how can we know we are indeed observing an echo? And, to what extent is this apparent echo true to its source? Having coded the data and warrant components of each argument in addition to its claim, we were able to address both questions.

We found that “accountability” discourse—of the sort that underpinned the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB)—drove the surging discussion of school failure at the national level in the late 1990s and across the 2000s. These arguments structured around “lack of accountability” data and the warrant of “inefficiency” also drove a similarly intense discussion of school failure at the local level during the late 2000s and 2010s.

So, was it simply that the national-level argument took some time to reach the local level? Was it merely a rhetorical echo bouncing across the nation’s 13,000 school districts? Again, the data and warrant codes proved enlightening. Whereas the surging discussion of school failure at the national level resulted in more than 58% of all arguments unifying the lack of accountability data with the inefficiency warrant, only 31% of the subsequent arguments about school failure at the local level did so. This means that while arguments about school failure at the local level took up either the lack of accountability data or the inefficiency warrant at a similar rate (79%) as the national discussion (85%), they more often paired them with other data or warrants to produce very different arguments. For example, a local school that is portrayed as inefficient (warrant) because it is over testing (data) is a very different school failure argument than those that supported the passage of NCLB.

Altogether, our analysis of school failure arguments in print news between 1984 and 2016 demonstrates that arguments about the state of the nation’s schools really do influence arguments about the condition of local schools. However, this influence is delayed. And, when the argument is replayed at the local level, the components of the original argument get remixed and can take on different, even opposing political valances. This makes some sense in a country where most citizens regard the nation’s schools as failing, yet resist seeing local schools as such. Although the argument about national school failure can crystalize and intensify to the extent that it results in major reform legislation, when that argument gets applied to individual schools and districts, it must contend with the particularities of local contexts that inevitably complicate it.

In Greek mythology, Echo was a nymph cursed by Hera for consorting with Zeus. Her punishment was that she could only speak when repeating the last words said to her. Although the rhetorical echo of educational reform might seem just such a curse—the local discussion of school failure merely repeating the narrative that emerged first at the national level—it isn’t quite so simple. The rhetorical echo of the school failure argument may be predictable and recognizable. But like the sonic phenomenon, it changes and distorts as it collides with the different contexts of local schools. 

References

DeVos, B. (October 1, 2019). Prepared remarks by Secretary DeVos at the American Enterprise Institute. U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/prepared-remarks-secretary-devos-american-enterprise-institute

Hlavacik, Mark. 2016. Assigning Blame: The Rhetoric of Education Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Phi Delta Kappa. 2019. The 51st Annual PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. Retrieved from https://pdkpoll.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/pdkpoll51-2019.pdf

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. 2016. The Condition of Education 2016 (NCES 2016-144), Reading and Mathematics Score Trends, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cnj.asp

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. 2017. Trends in High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/dropout/ind_04.asp

MARK HLAVACIK is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Texas where he studies the interdependence of rhetoric, education, and democracy.

JACK SCHNEIDER is an Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Director of Research for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment, co-editor of History of Education Quarterly, and co-host of the podcast “Have You
Heard.”