Gubernatorial Rhetoric, Teachers’ Unions, and Education Policy Outcomes in the American States

• In Event: Communication, Narrative, and Framing in the Policy Process

Abstract

This paper examines how governors’ public rhetoric toward teachers’ unions shapes education policy debates and outcomes across the American states. As the chief executive and agenda-setter within state governments, governors play a central role in directing attention to specific education issues and framing those issues in ways that influence public perception, legislative priorities, and policy implementation (Young et al., 2010. Drawing on a comprehensive dataset of all gubernatorial State of the State speeches from 1990 to 2022, this study investigates how education is discussed. Specifically, we examine how governors frame teachers’ unions and the relationship between that framing and state-level measures of teacher retention and student achievement (Adnot et al., 2017).

We begin by identifying education-related content at the sentence level, using a supervised classification model that tags each sentence as education-focused or not. For sentences related to education, we apply a fine-tuned RoBERTa model to classify them into specific education subtopics (e.g., school finance, curriculum, teacher quality). We then use stance detection models to determine whether each education sentence expresses a favorable, neutral, or oppositional tone toward teachers’ unions.

This fine-grained text analysis allows us to trace both issue attention and tone of union-related rhetoric over three decades of gubernatorial speechmaking. By pairing this speech data with state-level administrative indicators of teacher retention and student performance, we test whether rhetorical stance drives meaningful variation in education outcomes. We pay particular attention to temporal and partisan shifts in how governors engage with organized labor in education, exploring how these dynamics vary across different political and economic contexts.

Our findings speak to broader questions of political communication, interest group framing, and executive influence over the education agenda (Orphan et al., 2020). This paper contributes to our understanding of state level agenda setting by showing that governors’ rhetorical positioning can shape not just public and elite discourse, but also policy outputs and institutional stability in the education workforce. It also provides new insights into how labor unions are constructed in public narrative and the downstream effects it may have on teachers and students. Combining large-scale text analysis with policy outcome data advances our understanding of the political motivations behind education policy. In doing so, it highlights the power of speech as both a reflection of   Governor’s political priorities and a mechanism for shaping public policy in the states.

Adnot, M., Dee, T., Katz, V., & Wyckoff, J. (2017). Teacher turnover, teacher quality, and student achievement in DCPS. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 39(1), 54-76.

Orphan, C. M., Gildersleeve, R. E., & Mills, A. P. (2020). State of rhetoric: Neoliberal discourses for education in state of the state addresses and gubernatorial press releases. Journal of Education Policy, 35(3), 394-420.

Young, T. V., Shepley, T. V., & Song, M. (2010). Understanding Agenda Setting in State Educational Policy: An Application of Kingdon's Multiple Streams Model to the Formation of State Reading Policy. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 18(15), n15.

Authors

• Samantha Anne Schuermann, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
  Presenting Author

• Jason H Windett, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Jason Giersch, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
  Non-Presenting Co-Author