Our Half-Educated Education Debates

Lately there’s been much hand-wringing punditry about the education “culture wars,” with the mainstream media blaming right-wing extremists for heated fights over social studies, school boards, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), library books, and what-have-you. But what if right-wing extremism is mostly a figment of the mainstream media’s collective imagination? And what if it’s actually those enlightened pundits who are fueling the fights?

Education coverage often seems bent on ignoring or caricaturing conservative concerns, signaling to readers that the Right’s complaints are ignorant or insincere. This predictably frustrates the Right, ramping up populist outrage. And round and round we go.

Consider this winter’s AP African-American-history clash. When Florida governor Ron DeSantis objected to the politicized and polemical elements of the pilot course, major media portrayed him as a scheming, censorious bigot. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin accused him of mounting a “full-blown white supremacist” attack on “fact-based history.” The New York Times featured the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund declaring that “Florida is at the forefront of a nationwide campaign to silence Black voices” and “erase” black history.

Yet such attacks ignored inconvenient facts: Florida’s Stop WOKE law requires students to study the civil-rights movement, and DeSantis has repeatedly explained that he objected not to the subject matter but to units such as “Black Queer Studies” and “The Reparations Movement.” Whatever one thinks of these contemporary and controversial topics, questioning their inclusion in high-school curricula is hardly evidence of hostility to “fact-based history” or a desire to “silence Black voices.” The major-media coverage, though, echoed progressive hyperbole while providing no sense that conservatives might have sincere concerns or good-faith objections.

Now, it’s not news that newsrooms lean left. But they might still be interested in substantive debate, the habits of good journalism, or simply the veneer of fairness. Unfortunately, it appears that the guardrails of professional responsibility have corroded, to devastating effect.

In a series of studies over the past five years, I’ve examined how the media cover major education debates, such as those related to teacher strikes, critical race theory (CRT), and President Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness scheme. Looking at the nation’s most influential newspapers (typically the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today), I’ve examined what shows up in news reporting and found a maddeningly comprehensive bias. The problem isn’t just partisan bias but extends to matters of what gets covered and who gets quoted.

 

Perhaps the most pernicious source of bias is the way reporting systematically disregards inconvenient facts. For instance, in covering the wave of teacher strikes in 2018, the generosity of teachers’ health care and pensions should have been a major issue, yet fewer than half of news articles even mentioned health-care benefits. Not one story mentioned teachers’ vacation time, and just 3 percent of news stories mentioned the value of teacher pensions — even though in some strike states, the average teacher already earned more than the state’s median household. Just 2 percent of articles compared teacher pay and median household income.

Hostility to letting schools teach about slavery or Jim Crow was almost uniformly presented as the reason for public anti-CRT sentiment in 2020–21, even though polling showed broad support for teaching those topics. The pushback against CRT was actually about CRT, which, as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic enthuse in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” More than 90 percent of news accounts wholly ignored this rejection of equality, rationality, and objectivity, and more than 85 percent ignored CRT’s disdain for “color-blind” thinking. A reasonable person could have read a year’s worth of CRT coverage in the nation’s leading newspapers and come away convinced that the only question was whether schools should teach about segregation.

News accounts of Biden’s $400 billion student-loan-forgiveness proposal last year paid remarkably little attention to its legality, fairness, or logic. After Biden’s announcement, just one in five news stories even mentioned the 2003 HEROES Act, enacted in the aftermath of 9/11, which gave the secretary of education flexibility to keep troops or other affected individuals from falling behind on student loans when “necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency,” and which the Biden White House used to justify its unprecedented action. Just 24 percent of news accounts discussed its inflationary impact, and just 6 percent mentioned that those who had borrowed for graduate or professional degrees would benefit, not just college kids.

Then there’s the question of who gets quoted in news accounts. In the case of the student-loan-forgiveness scheme, 81 percent of the quotes from public officials were from Democrats and 19 percent from Republicans. When the subject of an education article is a conservative proposal, such as school choice, news accounts are typically dominated by competing takes from putative experts instead of testimonials from parents. Yet when it came to Biden’s proposal, the rules changed. Policy and legal experts were duly skeptical, but they accounted for less than 20 percent of quotes. Meanwhile, individuals identified as borrowers or borrower advocates accounted for 30 percent of quotes, and those identified as taxpayers or taxpayer advocates for just 3 percent.

Yet such attacks ignored inconvenient facts: Florida’s Stop WOKE law requires students to study the civil-rights movement, and DeSantis has repeatedly explained that he objected not to the subject matter but to units such as “Black Queer Studies” and “The Reparations Movement.” Whatever one thinks of these contemporary and controversial topics, questioning their inclusion in high-school curricula is hardly evidence of hostility to “fact-based history” or a desire to “silence Black voices.” The major-media coverage, though, echoed progressive hyperbole while providing no sense that conservatives might have sincere concerns or good-faith objections.

Now, it’s not news that newsrooms lean left. But they might still be interested in substantive debate, the habits of good journalism, or simply the veneer of fairness. Unfortunately, it appears that the guardrails of professional responsibility have corroded, to devastating effect.

In a series of studies over the past five years, I’ve examined how the media cover major education debates, such as those related to teacher strikes, critical race theory (CRT), and President Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness scheme. Looking at the nation’s most influential newspapers (typically the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today), I’ve examined what shows up in news reporting and found a maddeningly comprehensive bias. The problem isn’t just partisan bias but extends to matters of what gets covered and who gets quoted.

Perhaps the most pernicious source of bias is the way reporting systematically disregards inconvenient facts. For instance, in covering the wave of teacher strikes in 2018, the generosity of teachers’ health care and pensions should have been a major issue, yet fewer than half of news articles even mentioned health-care benefits. Not one story mentioned teachers’ vacation time, and just 3 percent of news stories mentioned the value of teacher pensions — even though in some strike states, the average teacher already earned more than the state’s median household. Just 2 percent of articles compared teacher pay and median household income.

Hostility to letting schools teach about slavery or Jim Crow was almost uniformly presented as the reason for public anti-CRT sentiment in 2020–21, even though polling showed broad support for teaching those topics. The pushback against CRT was actually about CRT, which, as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic enthuse in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” More than 90 percent of news accounts wholly ignored this rejection of equality, rationality, and objectivity, and more than 85 percent ignored CRT’s disdain for “color-blind” thinking. A reasonable person could have read a year’s worth of CRT coverage in the nation’s leading newspapers and come away convinced that the only question was whether schools should teach about segregation.

News accounts of Biden’s $400 billion student-loan-forgiveness proposal last year paid remarkably little attention to its legality, fairness, or logic. After Biden’s announcement, just one in five news stories even mentioned the 2003 HEROES Act, enacted in the aftermath of 9/11, which gave the secretary of education flexibility to keep troops or other affected individuals from falling behind on student loans when “necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency,” and which the Biden White House used to justify its unprecedented action. Just 24 percent of news accounts discussed its inflationary impact, and just 6 percent mentioned that those who had borrowed for graduate or professional degrees would benefit, not just college kids.

Then there’s the question of who gets quoted in news accounts. In the case of the student-loan-forgiveness scheme, 81 percent of the quotes from public officials were from Democrats and 19 percent from Republicans. When the subject of an education article is a conservative proposal, such as school choice, news accounts are typically dominated by competing takes from putative experts instead of testimonials from parents. Yet when it came to Biden’s proposal, the rules changed. Policy and legal experts were duly skeptical, but they accounted for less than 20 percent of quotes. Meanwhile, individuals identified as borrowers or borrower advocates accounted for 30 percent of quotes, and those identified as taxpayers or taxpayer advocates for just 3 percent.

In the case of the 2018 teacher strikes, union officials and teachers accounted for over half of all quotes, while just 5 percent were from parents or students affected by the strikes. In fact, while families bore the brunt of strike-related disruptions, just 14 percent of media accounts included even a single parent or student quote. And when parents and students were quoted, over 80 percent of their quotes were pro-strike, even though only about half of adults said they supported the teachers’ right to strike — and despite social-media activity suggesting that lots of parents were frustrated with shuttered schools. It’s almost as if reporters were cherry-picking quotes to reflect a favored narrative.

There’s also old-fashioned blatant partisan bias. During the first 100 days of the Trump and Biden administrations, across both news and opinion, there were twice as many Trump-administration education stories in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal as Biden ones. This was particularly striking, given that Biden’s first 100 days featured $200 billion in new school spending and fights about school closures and mask mandates, while there was nothing remotely comparable on the education front during the tumult of Trump’s early months. But the Times, for instance, ran nearly two dozen anti-Trump pieces (with headlines such as “The Trump War on Public Schools” and “Ms. DeVos’s Fake History about School Choice”) in the administration’s first 100 days, but just one that was forthrightly critical of the Biden administration over the same period.

Those results mirrored the findings of another analysis I conducted a few years back, comparing news coverage of Republican education proposals in 2017–18 (when the GOP had unified control in Washington) with that of Democratic proposals in 2009–10 (when Democrats did). In the major papers, 45 percent of news stories on GOP proposals had a negative slant; for Democrats, the comparable figure was less than 5 percent.

I have a hunch that all of these disparities are not due just to partisan groupthink but also to risk aversion, laziness, and the wish to publish clickbait. Reporters know they’re safe if they side with teachers, “anti-racists,” and borrowers. And rehashing well-worn talking points about heartless right-wing anti-teacher bigots is easy; mastering the complexities of teacher pensions or student-loan repayment is hard. And, of course, a story about the fight against proto-fascists is not only safe and easy but far more likely to generate clicks than a deep dive into the complexities of CRT or loan forgiveness.

But whatever its causes, the double standard has truly perverse consequences. By describing conservative positions as unfounded or ignorant, the media have degraded our discourse. And by giving progressive proposals little scrutiny, they have handed a free pass to extreme voices. All this has made it harder to find constructive middle ground on issues, when it can be found at all.

When it comes to “anti-racism” and CRT, there’s plenty of room for serious people on the left and the right to embrace inclusive, robust history while rejecting toxic dogmas. On teacher strikes, there’s room to agree on boosting teacher pay while also addressing issues about benefits and outdated salary structures. On loan forgiveness, there’s broad agreement that Biden’s proposal is neither legal nor equitable but that student lending does need to be revamped.

But in elevating extreme claims on the left and fueling frustration on the right, the nation’s agenda-setting media have made it far tougher to find such agreement. Indeed, if the nation’s most influential reporters and editors had consciously set out to exacerbate our distrust and division, the result would look a lot like what we see today.

This article appears as “Half-Educated” in the April 3, 2023, print edition of National Review.