In a world-first study, I explored how school teachers have been portrayed in Australian print media from 1996 to 2020. I looked at more than 65,000 media articles from all 12 national and capital city daily newspapers, including all articles that mentioned teacher and/or teachers three times or more.
With an average of 50 articles per week for 25 years, and a total word count of more than 43 million, my analysis is one of the largest of its kind.
While a lot has been written about teachers in the media over the years, this is the first study to systematically analyze is such many articles, representing such a complete collection of stories about teachers in newspapers, published over such a long time.
So what did I find? A lot. But here are three key findings that are critical when it comes to the way we think and talk about teachers and their work.
We are fixated on ‘teacher quality’
First, my research charts the rise and rise of attention to “teacher quality”, especially between 2006 and 2019. This period covers the start of the Rudd-Gillard “education revolution”, which reframed education in Australia as all about “quality”. It ends with the start of COVID, when reporting on teachers and education temporarily concentrated on homeschooling.
My analysis found the focus on “quality” was far more on teachers than, say, teaching approaches, schools, schooling, education systems or anything else.
Why is this an issue? It puts the emphasis on the purported deficiencies of individual teachers rather than on collective capacity to improve teaching.
It detracts from system quality - the systemic problems within our education system. “Teacher quality” is a way for politicians to place the blame elsewhere when they should be committing to addressing the root cause of these problems: inadequate and inequitable funding, excessive teacher workload, unreasonable administrative loads, or teachers being required to work out of their field of expertise.
Teachers made out to be simple (it’s not)
The second key thing I found is media reporting on teachers consistently talks about their work as simple and commonsense, as though all decisions made by teachers are between two options: a right one and a wrong one.
The phrase “teachers should” appears about 2,300 times in my database. Examples include, “teachers should be paid according to how their students succeed”, “teachers should not adopt a cookie-cutter approach to learning”, “teachers should arrive in classes prepared” and “teachers should not be spending time organizing sausage sizzles”.
Research conducted in the 1990s, and still widely referred to by scholars, found teachers make roughly 1,500 decisions in the course of every school day.
Recent research, including some I’m currently doing with colleagues, suggests teachers’ work has greatly intensified and accelerated over the past 30 years. So it’s likely 1,500 decisions per school day is now a very conservative estimate.
These decisions include everything from “what texts will we focus on in English next term?” to “should I ditch what I’d planned for this lesson, so we can keep having this conversation because the students are absorbed by it?”.
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