All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

This article is a critical discourse analysis of coverage in the National Post and the Globe and Mail concerning the Organisation for Economic Co operation and Development's 2000 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In this article, I have shown how numbers are interpreted through statistics to create a reality and analyzed the mechanisms used, through which information is constructed and reconstructed by and for the media. I have also explored how diverse voices are represented. The discourses of neoliberalism were embedded in the coverage of the PISA results and discourses that accentuated regional stereotypes were in use.

It is through the media that audiences come to learn about the apparent successes and failure of the education system. Despite this power, the connection of the media to educational leadership and policy making is often given little attention in determining the forces at play in evaluating what happens in schools. Using a critical discourse analysis of media coverage concerning the 1999 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the 2000 and 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the author argues that the media interpreted these test results in concert with business and electoral elites as a 'failure of marginalized students,' rather than a failure of society to address systemic discrimination. The media coverage of such failures presents solutions provided by business and government as common sense. Consequently, alternative framings, for example, as to what a successful education system would look like to people who are judged school failures based on the tests are never sought. There is also no discussion of the ways in which the PISA and TIMSS tests are constructed to favor the knowledge of dominant interests and ignore that which is outside this realm.

No abstract

Although the mainstream media and education systems are key institutions that perpetuate various social inequalities, spaces exist-both within and beyond these institutions-where adults and youth resist dominant, damaging representations and improvise new images. In this article, we address why educational researchers and educators should attend closely to popular media and democratizing media production. We analyze and illustrate strategies for engaging with and critiquing corporate news media and creating counter narratives. We explore media education as a key process for engaging people in dialogue and action as well as present examples of how popular culture texts can be excavated as rich pedagogical resources.