ABSTRACT

Journalistic news values and digital technology align with education policy and practice to construct a narrow world of Indigenous educational achievement and contribute to a discourse of negativity, failure and disempowerment. Digital technologies have enabled the online publication of educational performance that is a valuable source of news for journalists and editors. In this virtual world, Indigenous students are numerically ranked and publicly compared to their ‘mainstream’ peers. Despite significant criticism of the educational trend towards high-stakes testing and league tables there has been little investigation into the role of news media in the reporting of Australia’s National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). This article takes a media studies lens to examine the measurement and comparison of Indigenous school performance through the online publication of NAPLAN results and the My School website. A textual analysis of 143 news reports about Australian Indigenous students’ NAPLAN results over an eight-year period from 2010 to 2017 found that Australia’s news media told the story of Indigenous educational performance through a language of measurement and failure. This focus on deficit metrics fails to question the underlying assumptions of educational testing and comparison and perpetuates a discourse of deficit in Indigenous education.

摘要

新闻新闻价值观和数字技术与教育政策和实践相一致，构建了一个狭隘的土著教育成就世界，并促成了消极、失败和剥夺权力的话语。数字技术使教育绩效的在线发布成为可能，这对记者和编辑来说是宝贵的新闻来源。在这个虚拟世界中，土著学生与他们的“主流”同龄人进行数字排名并公开进行比较。尽管对高风险测试和排名表的教育趋势提出了重大批评，但很少有人调查新闻媒体在澳大利亚国家评估计划——识字和算术 (NAPLAN) 的报道中的作用。我的学校网站。对 2010 年至 2017 年 8 年间有关澳大利亚土著学生 NAPLAN 成绩的 143 篇新闻报道进行文本分析发现，澳大利亚的新闻媒体通过衡量和失败的语言讲述了土著教育表现的故事。这种对赤字指标的关注未能质疑教育测试和比较的基本假设，并使土著教育赤字的话语永久化。