Issue Attention in US Local Education Policy-Making

• In Event: Civic Learning on Campus: Bringing Political Science In Mini-Conference III: Local Political Institutions and Citizen Engagement across Cases

Abstract

The vast majority of education policy decisions in the US are taken by local school district officials in public meetings. Yet, these discussions are difficult to study at scale due to a lack of centralized meeting data. We extend recent work by Barari and Simko (2023) to create DistrictView, a dataset of over 130,000 school board meeting transcripts and videos from more than 1,500 school districts across the country. Our sample spans over a decade and represents about 1 in 8 districts nationwide. Here, we describe the computational pipeline used to create DistrictView, which relies on the YouTube API, manual validation, and text analysis. We present results on how local school districts and public commenters devote discussion time to issues in public meetings. Further, we analyze how these trends differ between policy areas, across places, and over time. Finally, we explore how institutional design of local school districts shapes the dynamics of issue attention.

Authors

• Tyler Simko, Harvard University

• Rebecca Johnson

• Soubhik Barari, Harvard University