Understanding public sentiment about educational reforms: The Next Generation Science Standards on Twitter

System-wide reform efforts in education in the United States are intrinsically challenging, and broad public support is likely to be a core component of their success. This study addresses the absence of any information on the degree of public support for the Next Generation Science Standards, a national science education reform effort. To do so, this study builds upon past research using social media data to estimate public sentiment for educational reforms with particular statistical (mixed effects models) and a number of data science (e.g., machine learning to detect user’s role as teachers) method. Using all posts on Twitter about the NGSS (N = 565,283), we found that the public sentiment towards the NGSS is overwhelmingly positive, with 11 negative posts for every 100 positive posts. Sentiment—especially teachers’—became more positive over time. These findings provide an indication that the NGSS may have some success as a system-wide reform.