Chapter 5: Testing, Testing, Read all About it: Canadian Press Coverage of the PISA Results

People “know,” that is, whether and which schools are good or effective irrespective of any authentic knowledge of actualized teaching practices, curricula, student needs, and so on according principally to representations—images—reported in the press. Hence, the relationship between school and society—teachers and students and the larger public—is in fact mediated, at least in part, by images, by test scores which may or may not indicate anything at all about the day-to-day workings of contemporary classroom and school-based life (or even student achievement for that matter; Vinson & Ross, 2003, p. 55).

The media are a central source of information about so-called good and bad schools for both the public and policymakers, yet literature about the power of the media has only recently been published. There is a small but growing body of research examining the role of the media in the policymaking process (Blackmore & Thorpe, 2003; Franklin, 2004; Levin, 2004; Lingard & Rawolle, 2004; Wallace, 1993).