'That Middle School Is Trash!!!!' Knowledge Formation about Local Schools on Social Media

The public often makes judgements about schools and what happens within them, despite rarely setting foot inside of one. Prior research finds that the public relies on word-of-mouth, news media, and online resources that rate and rank schools in order to make decisions. Notably though, much of the existing literature predates the widespread usage of social media. Drawing on mixed methods, including ethnography, survey, and interview, I examine how members of one community develop knowledge about their local public schools during the social media era. In article one, I find that emotionally charged posts about first-hand experiences, which often portray the local schools negatively, garner higher levels of engagement than other types of posts. Moreover, special interest actors, usually White moms, are able to harness public desire for "hot" knowledge and the power of Facebook's algorithm to promote their own agendas. In article two, I find that reliance on community-run Facebook groups as a source of information is associated with decreased levels of confidence in the local public schools, whereas reliance on school- and district-managed social media pages are associated with increased levels of confidence. In article three, I find that knowledge development about schools on Facebook functions similarly to the process of traditional opinion formation. Posters and commenters act as opinion leaders who shape and disseminate information about the schools through opinion frames, while Facebook users act as opinion followers who consume those opinion frames with surprising frequency. Overall, these three articles reveal that biased knowledge on Facebook undermines confidence in the local public schools in the community at the center of this study. As Americans spend less time face-to-face and more time communicating through screens, these findings raise alarms about confidence in local public schools elsewhere and warrant further research. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]