Education researchers and the media need to work together better to help inform the public on critical education policy issues increasingly being put before voters through ballot initiatives, according to University of Colorado at Boulder researchers.
Associate Professor Michele Moses of CU-Boulder's School of Education and Lauren Saenz, a CU-Boulder graduate student, studied nearly 300 print news articles about a Michigan ballot initiative to outlaw affirmative action to be voted on during the Nov. 7 election.
They will present the preliminary results of their ongoing study at the American Educational Studies Association annual conference Nov. 1-5 in Spokane, Wash.
"Overall, we found that readers without prior background knowledge about affirmative action are unlikely to learn anything new to frame their opinion on the initiative from most of the articles we studied," Moses said.
In Colorado, voters will decide on Amendment 39 and Referendum J, which if passed would direct all school districts in the state to spend 65 percent of their operating expenses on classroom instruction and services that directly affect student achievement.
"Education issues seem to be prevalent on state ballots, so it really is vital that the education research community and the media provide the public with useful information to make these critical decisions about education policy," Moses said.
If approved, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, or Proposal 2, will amend the state constitution to outlaw consideration of race and gender when it comes to which applicants get into college and who receives government jobs and contracts.
"This is very important nationally, because if it passes in Michigan, it will probably be on a ballot in Colorado and other states in the near future," Moses said.
In the study, they found that 70 percent of articles on the topic from June 2003 through October 2006 were news articles, as opposed to opinion, editorial or comment pieces. Of those, only one out of 10 gave the reader substantive information about affirmative action, according to Moses.
To be considered a substantive article, the piece had to include at least one of the following criteria: it had to cite evidence-based research; include context of the initiative and the issue of affirmative action; explain the rationale for and against affirmative action; or analyze what passage of the initiative would mean.
They found that about 17 percent of the opinion, editorial or comment pieces were substantive, meaning that readers were more likely to find research-based information, history and context and moral reasoning in "position" articles than in more prevalent news articles.
While she hasn't studied media coverage of the ballot initiatives in Colorado, she is certain of their significance.
"Voters now have the opportunity to make changes to education policy, which in the past was the responsibility of education administrators and policy-makers," Moses said.
"The information the public receives from the media today has a more significant role in the policy process than it did before state ballot initiatives became so prevalent. The bottom line is both the research community and the media need to do more to make sure the information is getting out there."