Scientific evidence in policy narratives. The shutdown of the New York City public-school system during the COVID 19 pandemic – a case study.

Stories and persuasive narratives play an essential role in communication and fast-paced policymaking in crises and mega-crises (Boin et al. 2016; Boin, McConnell, and ’t Hart 2021). For example, the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19 pandemic), which began in spring 2020, is a crisis that brought numerous disruptions of normality, including drastic policies like school closures which were greatly debated in stories and narratives by many policy actors. In March 2020, New York City (NYC) became an early epicenter of the pandemic in the US, with a case fatality rate of over 9% (Thompson et al. 2020). NYC’s public school system is the largest in the US. The shutdowns (State of New York 2020) affected over 1.1 million students (The New York Times 2020) and caused an enormous breakdown in the preexisting order. With great efforts regarding safety regulations, schools were reopened in September, only to be shut down a second time shortly after in November 2020 (The New York Times 2020). Both shutdowns came along with narratives by policy actors against and in favor of school closures. These narratives were based on (competing) scientific evidence on both sides, likewise arguing with the safety of students, teachers, parents, and the overall population. Against this backdrop, the following thesis analyzes how scientific evidence was used in the narratives surrounding the school shutdowns in NYC. As a relatively new and emerging approach in policy-based scholarship (Stauffer and Kuenzler (2021) in Special Issue of European Policy Analysis), the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is an ideal tool to analyze this research question. Narrative policy scholars that draw on Positivism and Postpositivism claim: It is through narratives that debates about policies are held (Shanahan et al. 2017, 173). Thus, to fully understand the policy process, the role of narratives must be studied. Following the two separate school shutdowns, two time periods are studied and compared: First, from the end of January 2020, when China announced the closing of their schools to the first school shutdown in NYC on March 16, and second, from September 21, when schools were reopened in NYC to the second shutdown, November 19. The examination of this case study is a non-experimental research design. Policy narratives are constructed and circulated by several policy actors (Jones, Shanahan, and McBeth 2014, 15). This study examines data from the Mayor, NY State Governor, the NYC Council Speaker, teachers’ organizations, the health care workers’ union, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), NYC Public Schools, and NYC Parents Union. Furthermore, narrative data can be sourced from any communication such as text, video, or symbols. For this case, study data are generated through content analysis of the communication involved in the policy debate. Relevant narratives in text form are analyzed, which were used in press briefings and conferences, media interviews, and messages from the social media platform Twitter. The analysis focuses on what narratives were told for each shutdown and what differences can be identified with particular regard to the use of evidence.