E-Advocacy in the Information Market: How Social Media Platforms Distribute Evidence on Charter Schools

Abstract

A growing body of research investigates how intermediary organizations (IOs) and their networks navigate, promote, and produce evidence on social media. To date, scholars have underexplored blogs, an important milieu in which IOs produce and disseminate information. In this analysis, we broaden the emerging scholarship on evidence brokering by examining how IOs and individual and independent bloggers broker knowledge via education policy blogs on charter schools and related education policy. Although blogging can potentially enhance knowledge production and dissemination, our findings demonstrate that bloggers often promote research evidence of uneven quality and scientific rigor.

The Importance of Being “Woke”: Charter Management Organizations and the Growth of Social Consciousness as a School Quality Marker

“…In addition, social media contains both curated and more spontaneous material, which can enable scholars to investigate marketing that is well vetted alongside content that is more quickly shared in response to emerging events. To date, much of the educational research examining social media activity has considered how forums have been activated in policy debates (Greenhow et al, 2019; Supovitz et al, 2018) or served to elevate ideas in support of a policy agenda (Castillo et al, 2021; Jabbar et al, 2014). Thus, this study makes methodological contributions through its analysis of social media posts, illustrating how they provide a window into marketing behavior and school quality characterizations.…”

A methodological approach to the analysis of PISA microblogs: social media during the release of the PISA 2015 results

“…Additionally, social media have become important tools for political and policy campaigns, and for politicians, policymakers, and policy activists. These observations apply to the field of education policy where there is, to date, a limited but growing amount of research on the topic (e.g., Castillo, La Londe, Owens, Scott, DeBray, and Lubienski 2020;DeBray, Hanley, Scott, and Lubienski 2020). We see this paper as contributing to the necessary progression of the research domain of social media and education policy by providing a methodological approach for researching this phenomenon.…”

The Last 20 Years of Empirical Research on Government Utilization of Academic Social Science Research: A State-of-the-Art Literature Review

“…Scholars can also interact directly with present or future practitioners through teaching and training (Charles, 2021; Tilbury et al, 2021), conference encounters (Janousek & Blair, 2018; Tilbury et al, 2021), direct policy advice, and legislative testimony, or, of course, temporarily or permanently becoming practitioners themselves (Bruce & O’Callaghan, 2016; Weiss-Gal et al, 2017). They can directly step into public discourse through media appearances or contributions (Andrews, 2017; Charles, 2021; Meagher et al, 2008; Tilbury et al, 2021; Weiss-Gal et al, 2017), uptake by or participation as research curators (Castillo et al, 2021) or through contributing to public consultations (O’Brien, 2005). Such public statements and engagements can in turn reach practitioners.…”