Navigating Public Narratives in the Digital Age: Impact of Social Media on School Board Governance

• In Event: School Districts in Precarious Times: The Extreme Politicization of School Board Governance and the Superintendency

Abstract

Purpose
Whether it’s debates over mask mandates or the banning of books, school boards are currently operating during times of increased scrutiny (Daly et al., 2019). Consequently, public narratives driven by social media play a crucial role in shifting both the public’s perceptions of school boards and how school boards govern (Collins, 2009). To better understand the influence of public narrative on educational policies, we investigated the social media coverage of the National School Boards Association's (NSBA) letter to President Biden. We explored the following research questions: (1) How did social media shape public narratives around the NSBA letter?, (2) How might the representation of NSBA on social media influence their equity-oriented policies and practices?

Theoretical Framework
Overall this study was guided by Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1997) and critical policy analysis (Diem et al., 2019; Horsford et al., 2019), however the social media analysis was primarily framed by social network analysis (SNA) (Scott, 2017).

Methods
We utilized SNA and critical discourse analysis (van Dijk, 2003) to collect and analyze the data. The data collected included the NSBA’s official Facebook and Twitter accounts, the official Twitter accounts of parental groups like Parents Defending Education and the public accounts of NSBA board members. The following search terms were also used to collect social media content: “NSBA”, “National School Board Association”, “NSBA and Biden”, and “NSBA Letter”. A total of 500 tweets from September 2021 to September 2022 and screenshots from 16 official Facebook accounts, and websites were saved for coding on MAXQDA. Of the 500 tweets, 276 were replies to larger threads, often belonging to a member of a parent organization or FoxNews journalist. The interactions in these larger threads demonstrates the power of online parental groups and the media in attracting responses to educational issues.

Preliminary Results
From tweeting article headlines to drafting original tweets and responding to larger Twitter threads, the increased interaction among parents online resulted in vast media attention on the NSBA’s letter to Biden. Our preliminary findings indicate that this increased attention on Twitter meant the misrepresentation of parents as “domestic terrorists'' expanded exponentially. The traction such tweets gained also caused a mobbing effect and immense backlash towards the NSBA, deepening the divide between the NSBA and online parent groups. Increased Twitter and other social media usage among parental groups also meant misinformation was difficult to correct.

Scholarly Significance
Over the last decade, research on parental input (Herold, 2018) and educational activism (D. Cox & McLeod, 2014) on Twitter has pointed to the rising influence of social media on educational policies. In fact, debates over Common Core (Supovitz et al., 2018; Wang & Fikis, 2019) and inclusive education (Schuster et al., 2021) largely take place on Twitter. As such, our paper advances previous work on public narratives of education policy and equity by calling attention to the power of social media on the work of educational organizations and their ability to advance equity and excellence.

Authors

• Jasmine Pham, University of Toronto - OISE

• Jami Carmichael, Arizona State University