My Inquiry Project Introduction/general stuff (no lit review)

I spent the rest of last week tweaking the idea for this project and reading. Below you will find a DRAFT of what I have completed so far. Clearly, it is still very rough, and I will be working on it more this weekend. Please feel free to comment, ask questions, etc.

And for those of you interested in following the paper about the urban students and identity construction, you can find it here.

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Making the Front Page: NCLB and urban education in the press

Since its inception in Texas, the education plan that ultimately became known as the No Child Left Behind Act (PL XX-XXX) has made news headlines. As the nation turns the page on the Bush Administration and elects a new President, questions about the future of No Child Left Behind abound as the candidates present their vision of public education in troubled economic times. Even so, one has to wonder, what impression the public has of the current state of NCLB and public education, particularly as it relates to urban schools, their teachers, and students. Perhaps, more important, and the focus of this article, is the role major media outlets have played in framing NCLB and urban education.

As a source of information, traditional major media outlets, like local and regional newspapers, are under more pressure to compete with emerging forms of digital news, while facing criticisms of partisan bias (XXX; XXX). This is significant; even so, an exploration of how a traditional news outlet, like the New York Times, frames issues related to NCLB and urban education provides useful information to policy makers and educators alike as they strive to understand what shapes the public’s point of view.

This article will illustrate how the NYT has framed NCLB and urban education in its front-page news. Using the NYT archives, I will illustrate how the NYT has constructed a view of NCLB and urban education in terms of how it frames urban teachers, students, and schools. INSERT FINAL SECTION ABOUT PAPER AFTER DATA ANALYSIS

The data set: The data discussed in this article are part of a data set from a larger research study examining the political discourse surrounding No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush’s landmark education legislation. The larger study examines speeches and press releases from the Federal Department of Education (ED) and media outlet sources like the NYT, Time, Newsweek, and other outlets frequently read by the public. While other aspects of the study have focused on the discourse of equality and social justice in the speeches of the Secretaries of Education (see, for instance, Goldstein and Beutel, 2008), the political construction of teachers as soldiers of democracy AND enemies of the state (see for instance, Goldstein and Beutel, in review; Goldstein, in review), this article will focus on the role one media outlet, the New York Times, has played in shaping public perception.

The NYT archives were search using a key word search of “urban education and No Child Left Behind,” with a date limitation of January 1, 2001 to November 4, 2008. XXX articles were identified. Of those XXX articles, XX were front-page features. These xx articles serve as the data set for analysis.

Critical Media Studies and Discourse Analysis
INSERT METHODOLOGICAL NARRATIVE HERE

The research questions:
1. What are the key issues that the NYT identifies in regard to NCLB and urban education?
2. Who are the stakeholders most frequently identified?
3. Who are the “experts” most frequently utilized by the authors and editors of the NYT?
4. What does the discourse reveal as the primary problems surrounding NCLB and urban education?
5. What solutions does the discourse reveal?