In the United States, teachers have been both respected and villainized in popular culture and politics. These varying and conflicting cultural ideas and representations of teachers impact policy design, shaping the distribution of benefits and burdens imposed on teachers. The media play an important role in both crafting and reinforcing cultural images and did so during the wave of teacher strikes in 2018 and 2019. These strikes were part of the Red for Ed movement which framed teachers as undervalued and deserving of greater policy benefits, in direct contrast to recent accountability policies that described teachers as ineffective and needing more oversight. How did the media portray teachers on strike, and how were teachers able to shape how they were constructed?Drawing upon Schneider and Ingram’s (1993) theory of social constructions, I extend previous work to examine how policy targets (in this case teachers) actively participate in the social construction of their policy image. Social constructions are the “cultural characterizations or popular images,” embedded explicitly and implicitly in society broadly and in policy (Schneider & Ingram, 1993, p. 334). To do this, I use a comparative case study of seven strikes, and qualitatively analyze the text and images from 828 online news articles from eight national news sources with varying partisan political leanings. I consider how teachers are constructed by the media in each event, noting the critical role that race plays in shaping the deservingness of teachers. I also analyze how the political lean of the news source relates to the social constructions portrayed. I then consider how teachers framed themselves through handmade strike signs. I propose a new conceptual understanding regarding how targets can affiliate with other target groups to associate with their political power or deservingness. In this dissertation, I find that teachers as a whole are portrayed as an advantaged group, both deserving and having strong political power, during the Red for Ed strikes. I note that teachers were portrayed as deserving more frequently during strikes in less urban locations where unions have less political power and when images show a majority of white teachers. Left-leaning news sources are more likely to portray teachers as deserving, and one Right-leaning news source (Breitbart) portrayed teachers as undeserving more frequently than deserving. The messages from teachers’ strike signs coincided closely with the constructions conveyed via media images, highlighting one way teachers as a target group controlled the media narrative about themselves.
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