The Representation of the Common Core State Standards in the U.S. Media

This research examines how the U.S. newspapers portrayed the Common Core State Standards between 2010-2017. Lexical choices and discursive strategies in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were identified using the Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies framework (Partington & Marchi, 2018; Reisigl, 2018). As a diachronic study focusing on the change in news discourse, the analysis unpacked the news framing during the adoption and implementation phases of the Common Core movement. The analysis showed that the media primarily foregrounded the perspectives favoring the quality of the standards (e.g., rigor, uniformity) and the control over local education. Clear shifts in news coverage were noted starting with the implementation of the common standards based on student and teacher experiences as well as testing practices.