Morality and News Media Representations of Mathematics Education

Mathematics education is often in the news and is often presented in controversial terms. The nature of news reporting influences public opinion, public policy and the context of mathematics teaching. In this study, we looked at how mathematics education is framed in Canadian newspaper reports after the publication of recent PISA results. We analysed 26 articles published in two clusters, in two national newspapers. We particularly focused on the moral dimension implicit in this corpus of news reporting. Our analysis revealed a dominant framing derived from the binary of traditional teaching vs. discovery learning, which is portrayed to be the prevailing cause of students' decline in PISA ranking. The dominant framing also includes a sense of moral decline related to both educational and economic trends.