Victims Alone Don’t Impact Policy

The Narrative Policy Framework amid the school reopening debate

By Madison Feist & Heidi Prior

It was March 2020 when America’s schoolyards began to empty. The absence of children bore witness to the drastic measures taken to protect Americans from the Coronavirus pandemic. By March 25, public schools in all 50 states had locked their doors and gone virtual, finishing the school year by educating America’s 50 million public school students through online platforms, zoom calls, and stapled packets of homework.

The pandemic continued into summer. September approached, prompting the question, “What about school this year?” Thus began a chaotic public conversation, in which an array of community members offered opinions concerning the future of public education amid a pandemic. These comments, though passionate and amplified through local media, made little observable impact on policy makers or the experiences school children are having today.

Uncertainty and Outrage

In the absence of clear federal and state directives, with summer 2020 winding to a close, school districts across the country began proposing three different reopening plans. One approach was to return to school in person 4 or 5 days a week, with new protocols for sanitizing, social distancing, and mask wearing. The second option to emerge was a hybrid plan. By splitting students into two groups, this approach cut class sizes in half, with students learning in person half time and online for the remainder. Finally, some districts chose to continue full-time virtual learning, revamping their online tools and methods from the previous spring.

In Utah, a checkerboard of these three approaches appeared across the state. With the start of school looming, school boards revised plans weekly as district leaders reacted to national politics, changing health guidelines, and backlash from angry parents. Because plans were framed as temporary, the whiplash inducing policy changes continued even after the school year began. Once dull, school board meetings became venues for heated policy debate, where stakeholders voiced opposition or support for their district’s chosen plan by telling stories of their own experiences navigating COVID-era education.

The abundance of parents, educators, and assorted community members chiming in to this policy discussion via public comments, emails, and letters to local newspapers caused policy observers to wonder: Are these stakeholders effectively advocating for school reopening policies? The answer is No. After reviewing over thirty public comments from school board meetings and local newspapers, it is clear that stakeholders are framing incomplete narratives to convey their opinions, with a singular focus on victims. Their narratives present school leaders with the opportunity to become the story’s villains or heroes based on their policy decisions, much like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel. According to the Narrative Policy Framework, these open ended narratives are ineffective at influencing policy towards a desired outcome.

The Narrative Policy Framework

Politicians, strategists, and policy experts know that new policy is rarely enacted without a strong narrative to support it. In politics today, legislators market their proposed policies using narratives that spread instantaneously through social media and 24 hour news cycles. Like a good story, policy narratives include characters, settings, morals, and plot, but unlike literature, they follow a strict form and are strategically crafted to convince others of a set of policy beliefs and a preferred policy outcome. Through narratives, policy advocates frame a problem and emphasize the need for a specific solution.

Narratives are intentionally used by coalitions to influence policy actors and public opinion. The 2009 debate over healthcare reform was especially noteworthy for the use of narratives during political debate. A journal article by Michal D. Jones and Mark K. McBeth outlines how narratives highlighting Hitler, socialism, and fascism were strategically used against personal stories collected by the Obama administration. These competing narratives are just one example of the power of narratives in any policy debate.

Role in School Closure Narrative

Narratives are not only used by policy professionals, but also by everyday people. As Deserai Crow and Michael Jones state, “policy actors wield narratives to help achieve their goals, communicate problems and solutions, and citizens use them to communicate their preferences to policy elites, among other uses.”

While observing the debate over schools reopening during a pandemic, it became clear that citizens were heavily relying on narratives to convey their experiences and opinions to school leadership, but their narratives seemed ineffective at producing desired results. There was little connection between the policies school boards adopted and the copious narratives competing for their attention. After closer analysis, it became clear that these citizens’ narratives were incomplete, and that many fell into the fallacies identified by Narrative Policy Framework theorists.

Constructing a COVID-Era School Reopening Narrative

Usually, policy narratives are crafted by experts trained in political strategy with in-depth knowledge of a policy issue. In the school reopening debate, narratives were communicated by various education stakeholders: parents, students, teachers, community members, and administrators. Most often, the stakeholders who spoke at board meetings submitted comments or wrote letters were either parents of K-12 students or teachers currently dealing with the pandemic.

The Wasatch Front Setting

Policy narratives are constructed with a specific context in mind, so we need to pause and consider the context of the Wasatch front, a narrow strip of land encompassing Salt Lake City and spanning 80 miles North and South along Utah’s Wasatch Range. This region’s unique and rather homogenous demographic make-up lends itself to a powerful narrative setting. With nearly 30% of the population under the age of 18; 92% of adults having a high school diploma or higher, and 90% of the population white, congruence between policy advocates and the leaders to whom they are presenting is high. The similarity between speakers and audience helps make a narrative compelling because the setting is commonly understood and experienced by both parties.

The setting of a policy narrative involves not only the geography and population but also the facts and realities surrounding the policy issue and actors. At the time of these observations, Utah was weathering COVID-19 with a low case count and limited economic damage, as indicated by the fact that Utah boasted the nation’s lowest unemployment rate. Even so, citizens generally accepted that COVID-19 was dangerous. This narrative setting was also shaped by the lean budgets given to public schools in the state. Utah spends less per pupil than any other state, and is notorious for low teacher pay and large class sizes.

A Cast With Too Many Victims

For a story to hold a plot, it must have characters. In policy narratives, the person or group who fixes the policy problem is the hero and the person causing the issue is the villain. The victims are those harmed by the situation. Policy narratives typically focus on heroes or villains, but the school closure narratives did not follow this pattern.

The most overwhelming trend in school reopening policy narratives was the tendency of almost all stakeholders to exclusively talk about victims. Community members who advocated for more in-person time, or a continuation of in-person instruction, highlighted students and their families as victims. These stakeholders were more likely to emphasize social needs, mental health, academic difficulties, and extracurricular activities. In contrast, stakeholders who advocated for less in-person time or the continuation of a virtual or hybrid model emphasized students and teachers/staff as victims and were more likely to focus on physical health and dangers of contracting COVID-19.

Although parents, teachers, support staff, families, and the community at large were all mentioned as victims, almost every stakeholder settled on students as the primary injured party. Whether advocating for remote, in person, or hybrid learning, the speaker always cast the students as victims of the policy they were fighting against. Students were victims of sub-par education. They were victims of a mental health crisis. They were victims whose dreams of a perfect senior year had been dashed. But the story stopped there. School reopening policy narratives had no heroes and no villains, no forward momentum. The only scent these missing characters arose when stakeholders gave school board members an option — becoming the hero or villain in the story themselves, depending on their impending decision.

Some might say that school reopening policy narratives don’t mention villains because the virus itself is the villain, but in reality, these narratives lack a villain because at the time of presentation the villain was still unknown. It’s helpful to imagine these narratives as Choose Your Own Adventure stories, in which the school board has the opportunity to become the story’s villains or heroes based on their policy choices. Perhaps, by speaking to school boards, stakeholders were really attempting to cast a hero in their story, imagining the policymaker agreeing with their perspective and rescuing the story’s victims from harm. Of course, this metaphor also allows for the possibility that policymakers could conversely become a narrative’s villain, creating policies in opposition to what a stakeholder recommended.

Combing through public comments also revealed that although feedback appeared evenly split, slightly more stakeholders advocated for the status quo than a change in policy. If a district was mostly online, the majority of those publicly commenting, often virtually, wanted to remain online. Districts already holding in-person classes saw more parents at board meetings heavily advocating to stay in-person. It could be that the power of a narrative is so strong that those living the narrative see the positives of their environment and are avoidant to change. The Narrative Policy Framework also notes that groups who perceive themselves as winning attempt to maintain the status quo to keep members in their coalition.

Overcoming the Monster

In literature, authors build a plot by describing the sequence of obstacles faced by a story’s hero while overcoming a physical or psychological monster. Similarly, stakeholders in the school reopening debate offered straightforward plots, explaining what obstacles the victims of the COVID-19 “monster” faced. Common obstacles in pandemic school policy narratives included struggling with mental health, missing out on everyday social life, exposure to an infectious disease, and unsustainable teaching conditions as obstacles.

While most stakeholder narratives treated the Covid-19 monster as a fear-inducing foe, the size and danger of the obstacles in the narratives varied greatly depending on the speaker’s perspective. This reflects a trend in policy narratives that scholars label issue containment and issue expansion. Presenters who felt positively about their district’s policies described problems as manageable, affecting students and families in negligible or reasonable ways. For example, parents supporting Salt Lake District’s online plan wrote:

“Those of us with resources will, as we always do, weather this challenge and our children will be fine. We wish others would recognize that and dedicate themselves to helping teachers support the students without the resources to navigate distance learning with the same relative ease”

This would be called issue containment- limiting the scope of the problem in your narrative. In contrast, presenters who were unhappy with their district’s current approach demonstrated issue expansion, describing policy impacts as broad-reaching and the possibility of students recovering from harm unlikely. Issue expansion was noticeable as parents predicted mass resignations and student transfers in a letter opposed to Salt Lake’s online learning policy:

“Those teachers that bring a high level of commitment and energy to their job will soon tire of cleaning up the mess and will resign. Parents who can’t provide a space or the necessary support will soon tire and transfer their students (leading to community spread) or simply give up and their students will be left behind.”

Oversimplifying the Problem

Paul Cairney, an expert in policy theory, perfectly describes the stakeholders in the debate over school reopening policy. He writes:

“ there are many ways in which we can understand and define the same policy problem… …. Therefore, actors exercise power to draw attention to, and generate support for, one particular understanding at the expense of others. They do this with simple stories or the selective presentation of facts, often coupled with emotional appeals, to manipulate the ways in which we process information.”

Parents and educators all identified the same policy problem: schools are attempting to safeguard student health while also keeping up with rigorous curricular standards, and failing. In order to promote their own proposed solution, many community stakeholders shared simple narratives alongside an emotional appeal for the district to modify or continue their methods. Each person selected a small piece of the overall picture of what was happening within massive and diverse districts, drawing attention to their own niche and its interests.

This is seen in the pleadings of an advanced high schooler begging for AP college credit classes to be put online and in complaints of an overburdened stay at home mom claiming that children just can’t learn outside a classroom environment. These stories, while true accounts are deceptive because they present a limited view of the reality of the situation, advocating for policies that fit their own needs whether or not they are a good fit for the rest of the community. This is apparent in two competing comments:

“My daughter was behind before the coronavirus and fell extremely behind with the distant learning. She was offered to attend on Friday for an hour with her teacher, however my husband and I work during that time so she wasn’t able to attend.” (Davis School District mother)

“Four of my five school aged children have asthma, two of whom have severe asthma that required hospitalization treatment. There are many families like ours. We don’t have the option to return to in person classes with case counts this high.” (Salt Lake School District mother)

In these anecdotal comments we see what scholars refer to as the “empathy fallacy,” the assumption that if a compelling personal account is shared, policymakers will be convinced out of empathy for the speaker. Actors with limited experience in the policymaking world, like the authors of these school policy narratives, often fall prey to the empathy fallacy, but it’s unlikely one will persuade a policymaker with empathy alone. Personal stories are filtered through each audience member’s own biases and perspectives. It may seem obvious to a parent that high school sports are essential to young adult development (and should not be canceled), but to a board member who sees football games as super spreader events, a homecoming game narrative will make little impact. A tug for empathy from board members is insufficient to produce policy change. An emotional story does not create a narrative strong enough for policy change, especially when that narrative already lacks a clear hero and villain.

Lessons learned from COVID education narratives

Narratives have the power to pierce people’s emotions unlike anything else. In the words of Barbara Hardy:

“For we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative. In order to really live, we make up stories about ourselves and others, about the personal as well as the social past and future.”

Narratives are foundational to the way humans see the world and connect with people. Narratives are a part of living, and using these narratives in a policy setting can adjust individuals’ belief systems better than any other tool. In the case of the school reopening narrative, connecting through experiences came naturally and was a vital tool to create a bridge between participants and policy makers.

Narratives can be an effective policy framework, but only when they are complete. As essential as a general contractor is to a building and a conductor to a symphony, the leadership of a policy advocate is inseparable from a successful policy mission. The lack of unity between constituents during school reopening policy debates resulted in a blurred and incomplete narrative. Citizens working on their own for public policy are most effective when they can come together for the cause and find a policymaker or advocate who will create a cohesive narrative on their behalf. Individual stories can have power and emotion, but without the essential pieces of a narrative, stand only as moving stories and not as a foundation for policy change. There is emotion in a victim-filled tale, but little probability of action without a hero to turn to or a villain to blame.

Stakeholders in the pandemic school policy debate needed leadership equipped to weave individual stories together and craft a narrative complete with heroes and villains alongside victims. Such a narrative would also include a causal mechanism to establish blame and responsibility for the problems outlined and chart a course to solve them. The experiences of these stakeholders are significant and deserve the time and attention of school boards and policy makers. Perhaps, with leadership and organization, these narratives will permeate the policy conversation and hold the weight they should.