96 Chapter 2 studies into that phenomenon by comparing the overlaps and differences in their respective descriptions (5). 2.3.1 History leading up to WCD In 1983, the Reagan administration in the United States accepted the educational report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, which was issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. The tone of this influential report was alarming because it underlined ‘the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system’ (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 7). It noted that the educational foundations of society were ‘being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity’ and that schools across the country had ‘lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort to attain them’ (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 9). The preoccupation was not solely economic but also included ‘the intellectual, moral, and spiritual strengths of our people which knit together the very fabric of our society’; therefore, the report focussed on ‘the levels of skill, literacy, and training essential to this new era’, proposing a broad range of reforms to enhance ‘excellence in education’ (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 10). It explicitly addressed the concern that 5 Meta-ethnography was mainly used in health research, but more recently it has found its way into educational research. Indeed, in a follow-up publication 30 years after the introduction of the method, Noblit stated: ‘Meta-ethnography posits that interpretations need to be synthesized. Meta-ethnography, in the end, constitutes additional layers of interpretation. Further, meta-ethnographical syntheses are not simply an aggregation of the interpretations already made in the studies being synthesized. Instead, meta-ethnography sees synthesis as involving translation – the translation of the whole interpretations (we like to think of these as storylines) of each study (not the individual themes, concepts or elements) into one another’ (Urrieta & Noblit, 2018, p. 36). The constituent parts of meta-ethnography are: (1) identifying intellectual interest that qualitative research might inform; (2) deciding what is relevant to the initial interest, driven by some substantive interest derived from a comparison of any given set of studies; (3) reading the studies repeatedly and noting of concepts and themes with close attention to detail; (4) determining how the studies are related by creating a list of key metaphors, phrases, ideas and concepts; (5) translating the studies into one another, rather more idiomatic than literal, through which data are synthesised; (6) synthesising the translations to compare concepts with each other and see if some translations or concepts can encompass those from other studies; and (7) expressing the synthesis (this will be done in the matrix). Noblit and Hare (1988) termed this a holistic method of interpretation.
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