School Implementation Climate Scale (SICS)
Category: Student Well-Being and Mental Health
Many of the most tangible and immediate political conflicts in American's lives occur at the local level. Yet, we lack large-scale evidence on how, why, and where conflict occurs in local governments. In this paper, we present a new dataset of nearly 100,000 videos of school board meetings, and a new measure of local political conflict. We use and validate this new approach using sentiment analysis and structural topic modeling. We then document consistent results: conflict in school board meetings broadly occurs at some point for most school boards, but the most intense conflicts are concentrated in small numbers of districts; this conflict often centers cultural issues like racial diversity and gender identity. We then show that conflict, particularly cultural conflict, is most likely to occur in larger school districts in cities and suburbs, in places with more white students, and in places with more political competition.
Keywords
ocal politics, conflict, text analysis, transparency, debate, school boards, public meetings, culture wars, gender, race
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/04na-g720
