Politics and the Mediatization of School Educational Policy

The Dog-Whistle Dynamic

Grant Rodwell

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000054668
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Didattica
• Sous-sujet: Didattica generale

Despite increasing prevalence over the past three decades and a clear impact on school education policy and practice, education's connection to dog-whistle journalism and politics has not yet been fully explored. Addressing this gap, Politics and the Mediatization of School Educational Policy examines the emergence and current impact of dog-whistle politics and journalism on education in Australia, the US and the UK, questioning what is at stake when this political dog whistle is directed at school educational policy and practice.

Exploring common targets for dog-whistling, such as teaching standards, teacher quality and specific curriculum areas, such as history, sex and health education, the book considers the broader social issues of xenophobia and racism, as well as the decline of print media and rise of digital news sources in its place, with each chapter including an in-depth discussion using peer-reviewed literature on the subject. Following the trail of dog whistles impacting in school educational policy and practice across these three countries, this book explores:

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• To what extent is the dog-whistle dynamic embedded in school educational policy and practice?

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• To what extent does the dog-whistle dynamic affect our understanding of school educational policy and practice?

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• How might we explain the continued flurry of dog whistles impacting school educational policy and practice?

As the phenomenon of the dog whistle intensifies both nationally and internationally, this timely and thought-provoking book is necessary reading for academics, postgraduate researchers and all members of school communities.

Chapter 1

Defining and describing the “dog whistle”

Introduction

In this chapter we explore the various nuances of dog-whistle dynamics, a necessary first step before we progress in consequent chapters to an understanding how dog-whistle journalism and politics have impacted on school educational policy and practice.

A periodic short survey of the media in the US, the UK and Australia reveals an increasing use of the term “dog whistle” in journalism and political discourse. Once the use and meaning of the term becomes apparent, there appears an increasing use of it in mainstream media. It’s a term, however, undergoing constant change, and a brief survey of the use of dog whistles over several decades in the three countries which is the prime focus of this book, well illustrating this point.

Two significant points rise out of our brief survey for the reader to ponder, and for this book in its sum of the following pages to attempt to analyze and explain:

• What has been the common focus of dog whistle journalism and politics across the three countries under consideration in this book?
• What is the “natural home” of dog whistles — the Left or the Right?

These questions are highly significant, as this book increasingly moves its focus to the impact of the phenomenon on school educational policy development.

This chapter will reveal how the dog whistle is a highly politicized device deliberately covert and designed to activate concealed prejudices, surreptitiously compelling people to come along in the political cause. For that reason alone, its impact on school educational policy deserves our close attention if we are to enhance our corpus of media citizenship.

From factual news reporting to opinion-based journalism: “a personal and subjective style … emphasizing argument and advocacy”

Readers immediately will recognize a clear link between the quickening pace of the move from purported factual news reporting by the major news corporations to opinion-based presentations. Indeed, any viewer of TV news would have noticed a vast change in style during the past decade or so. There has been a proliferation of opinion-based programmes such as Fox & Friends, in the US, The Pledge (Sky) in the UK and Jones & Co. in Australia. But before we point the finger exclusively at News Corporation as a principal offender here, we should recognize the contribution that traditional national news providers such as the Australian government-funded ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) makes in producing opinion-based programmes in the form of, for example, Q&A, The Drum and Insiders as a response to public demand.

Over recent years, the massive increase in the move by multinational news conglomerates from presenting news to presenting opinion is quickly gathering attention from researchers such as the RAND organization. Here, researchers found “a gradual and subtle shift over time and between old and new media toward a more subjective form of journalism that’s grounded in personal perspective” [Kavanagh, et al: 2019, 2]. The researchers uncovered evidence of a shift from “a journalistic style based on the use of public language, academic register, references to authority, and event-based reporting to one based more heavily on personal perspective, narration, and subjectivity” [Kavanagh, et al: 2019, 3]. Particularly, this trend was evident in electronic broadcast news and, to a lesser extent, in newspapers.

In a move appealing to researchers on the dog whistle, significantly, Kavanagh, et al [2019] was able to quantify the extent of these changes across platforms and over time. In respect to the relentless drift to opinion-based “news”, in comparing the characteristics of “new” and “old” media, Kavanagh, et al [2019] found that cable programming today is highly interactive and subjective, relying on arguments and opinions to persuade and debate. This is in sharp contrast with the more academic style and precise language employed in late twentieth-century free-to-air TV. Similarly, the study’s online journalism sample found “a personal and subjective style that, in many cases, emphasized argument and advocacy and was very different than the pre-2000 print journalism sample, which relied more heavily on event-based reporting that often referred to authoritative institutions or sources” [Kavanagh, et al: 2019, 3].

Researchers from the Washington-based Pew Research Center looked to exactly who was able to distinguish between “fact” and opinion in news reporting, finding: “In today’s fast-paced and complex information environment, news consumers must make rapid-fire judgments about how to internalize news-related statements — statements that often come in snippets and through pathways that provide little context” [Mitchell, et al: 2018, np]. Critically, they found: “The politically aware, digitally savvy and those more trusting of the news media fare better; Republicans and Democrats both influenced” [Mitchell, et al: 2018, np]. Moreover, it seems that younger Americans are better than older Americans at telling factual news statements from opinions [Gottfried & Grieco: 2018]. If nothing else, this research shows the relative paucity of research concerning exactly who responds to the political and journalistic dog whistle. Indeed, this points the way for researchers to dig a little deeper, and research exactly who is hearing the school educational policy-directed dog whistle.

What do we mean by “educational policy”, and where does the dog whistle fit?

Before we proceed further, however, we should be clear about what we mean by “educational policy”. If nothing else, the dog whistle directed at school educational policy is all about power — a mediatized influence on what occurs in the nation’s schools and colleges. Not simply, however, is this solely about gaining influence on school educational policy, but it’s also a reflection of widespread and deep anxieties associated with school educational policy, and a force in gaining wider political power.

As far back as 1993, Ball [1993, 10] considered that in much educational policy research too little attention was given to the precise meaning of “policy”, and that “the meaning of policy is taken for granted and theoretical and epistemological dry rot is built into the analytical structures they build.” Indeed, Ball [1993, 10] considered further that “it is not difficult to find the term policy being used to describe very different ‘things’ at different points in the same study”. Much, however, has occurred with school educational policy since then, especially in the form of the impact of the dog whistle in it.

Ball [1993] recognized the importance of examining the influence of power in researching school educational policy. In the twenty-first century’s third decade, we can now recognize power as being exerted on school educational policy and practice from afar, often anonymously in the form of coded messages through social media, outside schools and educational systems. Indeed, at other times from New York-based media moguls directed through dark rooms in capital cities throughout the world, or in political party policy rooms, or halls of power in Congress, parliaments and in rooms given over to journalists in far-flung cities; or, indeed, in election strategy centres where, for example, “the masters of the dark political arts”, the Sir Lynton Crosbys of this world plot out electoral attack strategies. In Ball’s [1993, 10] words: “Textual interventions can change things significantly.” The dog-whistle dynamic, here, certainly did that for school educational policy.

In pursuing the power thesis in explaining the notion of policy, Ball [1993] looked to Foucault [1981, 94, cited in Ball: 1993, 13] who argued how power is productive: “Relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, where ever they come into play.” With every contribution, for example, Fox News makes in firing off a dog whistle, and if, and when, it begins to gain political traction, there are shifts in power as well as possible changes to educational policy. Ball [1993, 13] explained this as: “Policies typically posit a restructuring, redistribution and disruption of power relations, so that different people can and cannot do different things.” Indeed, Ball [1993. 13] concluded: “Power is multiplicitous, overlain, interactive and complex, policy texts enter rather than simply change power relations.” Writing in what essentially was then a dog whistle-free media landscape, Ball [1993, 13] was seeking to explain “the complexity of the relationship between policy intentions, texts, interpretations and reactions”.

To substantiate his point concerning “the meaning” of the notion of policy, Ball [1993, 13] looked to the work by Offe [1984, 106] who offered a similar view:

The real social effects (“impact”) of a law or institutional service are not determined by the wording of laws and statutes (“policy output”), but instead are generated primarily as a consequence of social disputes and conflicts, for which state policy merely establishes the location and timing of the contest, its subject matter and “the rules of the game”. In these cases of extra-political or “external” implementation of social policy measures state social policy in no way establishes concrete “conditions” (for example, the level of services, specific insurance against difficult living conditions). Instead, it defines the substance of conflict and, by differentially empowering or dis-empowering the relevant social groups, biases the extent of the specific “utility” of the institutions of social policy for these groups.

Even from this 1984 perspective, we can better understand the relationship between school educational policy and the dog whistle: The “practice and the ‘effects’ of policy can’t be simply read-off from texts and are the outcome of conflict and struggle between ‘interests’ in context” [Ball: 1993, 13]. Here, by inference, there is a clear reference to the dog whistle impacting public policy.

From here, Ball [1993, 14] moved the focus of his argument to the notion of “policy as discourse”, where policy “actors are making meaning, being influential, contesting, constructing responses, dealing with contradictions, attempting representations of policy”. Thus, for example, when one reads in Chapter Three of our book the Schliebs and Deutrom [2017] article in the The Weekend Australian on 17-18 June 2017 ran as a front-page story on the Australian Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Government’s Building Education Revolution (BER) the reader can ask for what purpose: to inform the Australian public on recent developments with the BER, or to dog whistle some other message political in nature?

The definition of “policy” has evolved over time. Drawing on the seminal work of Easton [1953], Lingard [2013, 116] supports the definition of policy as being “the authoritative allocation of values”. Critically, Lingard [2013] looked to the work by Head [2008] who had “written instructively about how all policy is framed or assembled across various mixes of the political (values), evidence (including research) and professional knowledge”. This definition takes into account the dog whistle, a manifestation of the term “values”.

However, for the purpose of our book we also recognise the importance of Ball’s [1994] definition. This includes policy as texts and action, policy as discourse and policy as outcomes. It’s valuable here because policy researchers themselves, such as the author of this present book, do not work in a policy-agnostic environment. Bacchi [2000, 46] argued in respect to the policy as discourse thesis: “It is inconsistent to search for a ‘correct’ definition of policy discourse.” In her view, to attempt to provide a definition would contradict the logic of the structure of thought in which the term “discourse” now has a newly powerful critical function. So, according to Bacchi [2000], the very act of attempting to define the meaning of the term “discourse” may have political implications, and certainly requires scrutiny. Or as Bacchi [2000, 46] puts it: “The whole idea of discourse is that definitions play an important part in delineating knowledge” (emphasis in original). Thus, Bacchi [2000, 46] contended: “Key terms are finally more important for their place within intellectual practices, than they are for what they may be said to ‘mean’ in the abstract.” Of course, it can be argued, ipso facto, the same applies to her argument — that’s foreshadowing an examination of Bacchi’s argument for political motive as reflected in dog-whistle discourse.

Bacchi [2000, 46] then made another important point highly relevant to our study. Given this understanding of the meaning of discourse, she contended those researchers who seek to use critical discourse analysis (CDA) in policy analysis, because they themselves become actants in the discourse, they ought to state, or reflect upon, their motivation for undertaking the particular research: “Policy-as-discourse theorists define ‘discourse’ in ways that accomplish goals they/we deem worthwhile. In the main, policy analysts who described policy-as-discourse have at some level an agenda for change.” Of course, this applies equally to people such as myself who seek to describe the impact of the dog-whistle dynamic on school educational policy.

For Bacchi [2000, 46], these writers on policy as discourse (and policy as the product of the dog whistle) “tend to be political progressives, loosely positioned on the left of the political spectrum”, and no less ideological-free than the Donald Trumps or Rupert Murdochs of this world. “They define discourse then in ways that identify what they see to be the constraints on change, while attempting to maintain space for a kind of activism” [Bacchi: 2000, 46]. Indeed, “their primary purpose in invoking discourse is to draw attention to the meaning making which goes on in legal and policy debates” [Bacchi, 2000, 46]. Researchers and writers on policy discourse do so from their own ideological base, and have their own agenda.

Certainly, in undertaking policy research, and while recognizing the researcher thus becomes an actant in the discourse, Bacchi’s [2000, 46] point is very pertinent in regard to this book. She stated: “The argument is that issues get represented in ways that mystify power relations and often create individuals responsible for their own ‘failures’, drawing attention away from the structures that create unequal outcomes.” With special — if unintended relevance for our arguments concerning the impact of the dog whistle on school educational policy — Bacchi [2000, 46] claimed: “The focus on the ways issues get represented produces a focus on language and on ‘discourse’, meaning the conceptual frameworks available to describe social processes.” In our case, this applies to dog whistling directed at school educational policies and practices.

This section of this chapter reasonably establishes that the dog-whistle dynamic as a part of educational policy is, in a sense, always in a state of flux, pulled in various directions by a multitude of forces, including politicians and journalists, and those of researchers and writers.

Unmasking the political and journalistic dog whistle: “an all-purpose dog whistle that … the undeserving poor hear loud and clear”

There’s about as much chance of having people agree when and where the term dog whistle was first used as having people agree on who’s the greatest ever NBL (National Basketball League) player. According to Safire’s political dictionary, the Washington Post may have first used the term in an article about political polling in 1988. It explained that “subtle changes” in poll wordings led to respondents understanding the questions differently than the researchers did [Loubriel: 2017, np].

According to Merriam-Webster [nd, np], however, the term,

“dog whistle” appears to have taken on a political sense in the mid-1990s; the Oxford English Dictionary currently has a citation from a Canadian newspaper, The Ottawa Citizen, in October of 1995, as their earliest recorded figurative use: “It’s an all-purpose dog whistle that those fed ...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Defining and describing the “dog whistle”
• 2. Dog-whistle journalism, politics and school educational policy: An overview and an appraisal
• 3. Dog-whistle journalism and politics: National governments and the politics of school education
• 4. Dog-whistle journalism and politics: Xenophobia, racism and Islamophobia in school education
• 5. Dog-whistle journalism and politics: National curricular
• 6. Dog-whistle journalism and politics: School choice, educational standards and teacher preparation
• 7. Contexts: Bringing it together
• Index