Framing School Integration: A Computational Analysis of Newspaper Discourse, 1990–2020

Abstract

Research on public opinion finds that most Americans support the racial integration of schools in theory. At the same time, however, they tend to oppose specific policies for achieving it. How is it that the American public comes to conceive of school integration as both an abstract idea and a set of concrete policies? Research has shown that one major source of the public’s understanding of complex social issues like school integration are news media organizations and the choices they make in how they cover them—that is, how they frame social issues. This article examines how school integration was framed in the news between 1990 and 2020. It does so with a dataset of over 13,000 articles from 25 newspapers. The article also examines determinants of those frames, asking what contextual factors shape the production of the news. The results reveal three overarching trends in how school integration was covered in the media over time: depoliticization, historicization, and neoliberalization. These trends varied by the political slant of the newspaper, by location (whether it is in a former Jim Crow state), and by whether the newspaper has a national readership. The author discusses implications for research and policy.