Social media sites, such as Twitter, is becoming a platform for teachers to debate issues regarding the implementation of Common Core State Standards in their schools. Recently, three researchers looked at the ongoing conversation on Twitter, and said that the social media outlet is "making the invisible visible."

So says Valerie Strauss, education reporter for The Washington Post. Strauss said that Twitter is "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.

Strauss said they analyzed 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."

See the whole project here.

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Article by Kassondra Granata, Education World Contributor