Imagine every news story that you read, hear or watch is a painting hanging on an art gallery wall. Just as the artist determines not only the main subject matter of the painting but everything else that gets included on the canvas, it is the producer of the news story who decides what issue to cover, what “facts” should be included, whose opinion will be voiced and whose opinion will be ignored. In other words, it is the reporter or journalist who decides what’s inside the frame and what gets left out. Deciding what issues to cover and what angle or perspective to use is called framing. How a reporter frames a story is guided by many factors including, but not limited to, the reporter’s experience of the world and the assumptions they’ve made about the issue in question.

Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander & DCPS School’s Chancellor Kaya Henderson listening intently (or not) to the River Terrace Community as they plead for their school.

Let’s take a specific example, local mainstream news reporting on proposed school closings in DCPS. In this article by Washington Post education reporter Bill Turque School Closings Unlikely to be Widespread, the assumption that school closings will have a positive impact on DCPS is not obvious, but it’s there. Turque trusts just two sources–School’s Chancellor Kaya Henderson and Deputy Mayor for Education De’Shawn Wright. As city officials who have a budget to balance, they may prioritize the alleged cost-effectiveness of closing schools over providing a world-class education to the city’s children but that possibility is never explored. The parents who may be forced to uproot their children from one school and bus them to a location outside of their neighborhoods are not included. And why should they be? After all, closings are unlikely to be widespread. The title of the article itself suggests that only a relatively few families will be inconvenienced and that their loss is acceptable in the face of the positive gains that may or may not be achieved throughout the system as a whole. Also left out of the frame are the teachers and the students themselves, who may not agree with Kaya Henderson’s definition of an under-enrolled school, especially if that definition means an increase in the size of their classes. Members of the community at large aren’t likely to be considered at all by mainstream news sources covering education issues but that doesn’t meant they are not impacted when a community’s school is torn down in lieu of luxury condos. To his credit, Turque does mention one school community–River Terrace, whose elementary school is scheduled for closure next year, but he says nothing about how the school’s closing might impact the River Terrace community. Of course, including all of those voices might take too much time. No doubt he has a deadline to adhere to. He may also have constraints on the number of words he’s allowed in his column. On the other hand, if he really wanted to include the voices of the River Terrace school community in his article, he could have simply provided a link to his previous article River Terrace Pleads for its School. In this article, River Terrace parents, students and community members are quoted but not until the end of the article. Also, Turque points out the official estimate of $800,000 in savings should the school be closed, adding in his own words, “no small matter given the city’s fiscal straits.” If Turque were committed to giving equal weight to both sides of this issue, he might have countered with Kaya Henderson’s statement “If every community had this level of engagement, DCPS would be the best school district in the country,” which surely suggests that $800,000 is no savings at all if the result is a lower level of community engagement. So, let’s review. Turque’s trusted sources are known to believe in the efficacy of school closings, otherwise they wouldn’t have closed schools in the past and they wouldn’t be advocating for more closings now. Any sources that just might believe that closing schools will not improve DCPS are not in the frame. Fortunately, we have a frame of our own to fill. On January 12, 2011, over 200 members of the River Terrace Community attended a public hearing regarding the proposed closing of their elementary school. Over 40 parents, teachers, students and members of the community testified. The video below is just a small portion of that hearing in which . . . → Read More: Who’s In The Frame? A Closer Look at School Closings and the Mainstream Media