Did the Press Do Its Due Diligence on the Common Core?
by Frederick M. Hess • Mar 31, 2014 at 8:35 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
I think the Common Core debate has been so heated, in large part, because it seemed to many that it emerged from nowhere, as a fait accompli. The annual Gallup/PDK poll reported in August 2013 that just 38% of respondents had even heard of the Common Core. Indeed, today, it's easy to forget that the Common Core's appearance in 2009 and 2010 received little attention. Now, this seems odd, given that the New York Times celebrated the Common Core as "a once-in-a-generation opportunity" and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said it "may prove to be the single greatest thing to happen to public education in America sinceBrown versus Board of Education."
That peculiar disconnect between its presumed import and the lack of attention is the subject of a new report by my AEI colleague Mike McShane and me. In the report, titled Flying Under the Radar: Analyzing Common Core Media Coverage, we take a deeper look at how carefully the press covered this "once-in-a-generation" phenomenon. (Full disclosure: The report is published by my shop at AEI.)
We tallied LexisNexis coverage to examine press coverage of the Common Core. Now, as McShane and I point out, "Any project like this one is limited by the tools at researchers' disposal to analyze the data available. We used LexisNexis because it is a consistent, stable, and reliable source of aggregation of news stories and wire reports. It is not, however, an exhaustive source for everything written about a topic in a given time period. Numerous blogs and trade press also wrote about the Common Core, most notably Education Week...These, however, were mostly designed for the education community and had a limited effect on the broader public discourse."
McShane and I find that U.S. news outlets mentioned the term Common Core 453 times in 2009 and 1,729 times in 2010--the period during which the standards were first unveiled and during which more than half the
