How Twitter is changing the national Common Core debate
Is Twitter affecting the national debate on the Common Core State Standards initiative? Three researchers working on a digital reporting project say “yes” — and they call this the first national policy conversation played out in social media.
The university researchers looked at hundreds of thousands of tweets at #commoncore over a six-month period and analyzed them not only for content but also by author. One key finding: Twitter is “making the invisible visible,” giving people who usually have no voice in national discussions power to express their opinions and affect discourse. The researchers also noted that the debate over the Core isn’t only about the Core standards themselves, but, rather, about issues such as the federal involvement in local education issues, student privacy, standardized testing, the role poverty plays in student achievement and how for-profit companies are affecting education.
The researchers undertaking the project are Jonathan Supovitz, professor of education policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and co-director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education; Alan J. Daly, chair of the Department of Education Studies at the University of California, San Diego; and Miguel del Fresno, a communications professor at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Spain.
They analyzed some 190,000 Tweets from September 2013 to February 2014 at #common core from 52,994 Tweeters (and are now analyzing hundreds of thousands more Tweets). Most of the tweets were written in opposition to the Core or related reforms, though the researchers said they found only two specific sets of complaints about the standards themselves:
Claims that the Standards are developmentally inappropriate because they were back-mapped from college- and career-ready outcomes to early childhood expectations;
and
Critiques that the Common Core focused solely on academic skills and expectations while ignoring equally important social and emotional development.
Noting that “politics makes strange bedfellows,” the researchers divided the tweeters into three “particular structural communities”: one that generally supported the Common Core, one made up of educators who opposed the Common Core, and the third comprising actors from outside of education who opposed the Common Core primarily due to their connecting it to larger social issues.” The most active participants using #commoncore on Twitter came from the third group. Supovitz wrote:
But another important lesson from our analysis of the CommonHow Twitter is changing the national Common Core debate - The Washington Post:
Big Education Ape: #commoncore Project - How social media is changing the politics of education http://bit.ly/18hHH23
