Now that I am in a quality doctoral program with quality faculty, I am free to work on research and submit papers for publication, again. You see, the first year of my doctoral work in Educational Psychology was spent working on publishing my research on pretraining to help with online training. I was successful at submitting and presenting that research in progress work at a conference in Las Vegas. However, after that conference I was shut down summarily and was not allowed to progress. I was not allowed to even present my research findings within the department. Ridiculous! But I did not see it at the time.

Well, Fall semester of 2010 I took a historical research methods class from Dr. Kim Mangun. I was applying for the Communication Ph.D. program at the time, and she was on the approval committee. I did not know that at the time, though. She was an excellent teacher and helped me with my writing more than anyone, ever. She spent gobs of time using Word comments to give me suggestions and writing training. Rather than taking offense at this help, I had the right attitude and embraced the help.

My research project for the class was a comparison of newspaper discourse about education from the years 1946 and 2005. Ann Darling and I had talked about how politicians and newspapers have seemed to manufacture the myth that schools are broken and unable to teach our children. This myth has persisted because of consistent rhetoric from various politicians spinning lies. I read research stating that test scores (except SAT) have actually increased over time, not decreased. We supposed that there was a change from post World War II reports to current reports in newspapers. Following WWII, public sentiment about education was positive because schools create learned people who contribute to their communities. This public view soured over time as people realized schools could not solve all social ills. This created an atmosphere where politicians could claim education was broken, despite its many successes in training our children well.

I looked through microfilm for 1946 reports from The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News, and I found 200 articles that were quite positive about education. From 2005, I found 200 articles from both papers that were mostly negative and quite critical about education. Both Utah papers reflected the rhetoric and the lies of politicians.

So I have been working really hard for the last two weeks tidying up and fixing the writing of my paper. Tonight I submitted my paper to the American Journalism Historians Association. I hope it gets accepted, but its all good if its not.

My mentor, Kim Mangun, also submitted her research to this convention. She should be accepted because her writing and research are beautiful. Her specialty is historical communication research.