Marcia Xiyu Yang

In 1983, the U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk, asserting that the failure of American schools threatens the future of the nation. Since then, policymakers, philanthropists, teachers, and parents have bemoaned the education system as being in “crisis”. This phenomenon extends beyond U.S. borders, with both developed and developing countries facing decades-long learning crises and varied cultural wars that play out in schools. In addition, the U.S. and globally public discourse routinely paints education as the source of a range of social ills, from conservative concerns about the unraveling of “traditional” values to progressive accusations of schools perpetuating institutionalized racism and inequality.

Crisis narratives in media discourse create a public spectacle, theoretically eliciting reactions from policymakers and generating reforms. With a novel cross-national and longitudinal dataset of education news covering 141 countries over 25 years, my research aims to shed light on the causes and consequences of crisis narratives, disentangling narratives around the learning crisis and cultural contestations.