Teach For America: The Intersection of Social Media and Education Reform

• In Event: 70.050 - The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education: Understanding, Critiquing, and Resisting Capital's Current Agenda for Education

Abstract

Teach For America (TFA) has, without doubt, helped shape the growing conversation of education reform. And while this contribution can be found in the teachers it trains and the alumni who venture into education leadership roles, it can be readily found in the realm of social media. In fact, over the last few years, many education policy organizations and proponents have increasingly used Twitter to reach out to supporters, promote ideological agendas, and debate opponents. Because TFA has become a significant component of the educational landscape, the objectives of this paper are to examine: (a) how TFA engages with/uses Twitter to promote and defend its brand and message; (b) who TFA engages with – or ignores – in the ongoing digital conversation surrounding education reform; and (c) what evidence is provided by TFA during this digital conversation.
Given the growing debate surrounding TFA in both academic venues (Maier, 2012; Vasquez Heilig & Jez, 2010) as well as public venues (Kovacs, 2011; Miner, 2010), understanding how supporters and detractors discuss TFA in the public realm of Twitter will provide a candid insight into the current role TFA is playing in shaping educational policy discussions.
Drawing upon previous research that analyzed how intermediary organizations impact educational policy discussions on Twitter, this paper examines how the leadership of TFA leverages Twitter to promote its view on education reform. We collected a comprehensive list of tweets between June 5th, 2013 and September 5th, 2013. Using the program Tweet Archivist (www.tweetarchivist.com), 33,402 total tweets were collected. In all, there were 15,304 tweets sent by, or to, the four official Twitter accounts of: @teachforamerica (11,167), @wendykopp (1,722), @villanuevabeard (1,630), and @kramer_matt (785). Further, over 18,098 tweets were sent that include the Twitter hashtag of either #TFA (16,716) or #teachforamerica (1,382). The users mentioned in tweets were broadly coded as either “In Coalition,” or as “Opposition Coalition.” This dichotomy, while limiting, proved to be an efficient method for broad coding. To provide more detail to the coding, the grouping “In Coalition” was further coded into “TFA Official,” “TFA Alum,” “TFA Staff,” “TFA Corps Member,” “TFA Affiliated,” “In Reform Coalition.”
While the full findings cannot be explicated in this short proposal, of immediate interest is the engagement (or lack thereof) between those Twitter usernames categorized broadly as in “Opposition Coalition” and “In Coalition.” In total, of the top 25 usernames who engaged with or on behalf of TFA on Twitter, there were 1,716 tweets from those categorized as “Opposition Coalition” while there were 1,197 tweets from those categories as “In Coalition.”

Authors

• T. Jameson Brewer, University of North Georgia

• Matthew Wallis