Pushing Back: How One School Board Publicly Deliberated State-Level Teacher Personnel Policies

This case study examines how one urban school board publicly discussed teacher personnel policies that interacted with local teaching workforce interests. Not much is known about how school boards interact with state level policies as they grapple with issues of local implementation. I analyzed archived recordings of school board meetings and documents covering a fiscal year (July–June) in an urban school system in North Carolina. Throughout the course of the 2013–2014 fiscal year, the school board deliberations took a tone of pushing back on state-level teacher and staffing policies. I tracked the types of evidence and problem-framing used by board members during deliberations about teacher personnel policy at public board meetings. The board most often used broad appeals, example, and data (restricted to numerical/statistical) in their deliberations. The problem was usually framed as one of economics. I provide some possibilities as to why the board relied on these evidence types and problem frames and suggest future avenues of research to better understand how school boards interact with state level policies.