SONDHEIM PUBLIC AFFAIRS 150 HONORS SEMINAR                                           

Spring 2009

Tuesdays and Thursdays 11:30-12:45

Dr. Roy T. Meyers

Professor of Political Science

Director, Sondheim Public Affairs Scholars Program

Office Hours: TTh 10-11:15, and by appointment

318 Public Policy Building

410-455-2196 (office)

410-381-4755 (home)

meyers@umbc.edu 

Class listserv: pas10@lists.umbc.edu

Delana Gregg

Assistant Director, Sondheim Public Affairs Scholars Program

315 Public Policy Building

410-455-2916 (office) or 443-722-9568 (cell)

delana1@umbc.edu

Office Hours:

M-F 8:30-4:30

Best bet: set up an appointment

Course objectives

This second introductory course for the Sondheim Public Affairs Scholars Program is designed to:

help you develop skills for public policy analysis and advocacy;

allow you to compare the perspectives and methods used in the various social sciences and other disciplines that are related to public affairs; and

deepen your understanding of how public policy affects our society through reflection on service-learning experiences.

Readings and related assignments

We expect that you will carefully read and think about every assigned reading before class. We also will ask you to react to assigned readings in three different formats: brief emails, writing assignments, or wiki group assignments. The prompts for these assignments will be updated weekly on the Blackboard page. But your reading and thinking should go beyond our prompts to identify questions of interest to you. For example: why is the author making this argument?; might any of the article’s contents be wrong?; or, what is the meaning of this unfamiliar word? (the answer is usually in your dictionary).

Emails should be sent to meyers@umbc.edu so they can be read early on the morning of class. In most cases, you should not write more than 2-3 sentences. Writing assignments should be 2 double-spaced and typed pages with normal fonts and spacing. This length sometimes troubles students because they would like to write much more. However, we believe that the 2-page limit provides a valuable discipline–in part because it resembles the average attention span of important decision-makers, whether they be chief executives or regular voters. If you cannot succinctly communicate your essential points, your advice will be lost. But we also want your writing to reveal the important complexities that are inherent in most policy problems. Therefore, each assignment should be well-prepared: brainstorm to begin, complete a draft, revise it, proofread and copy edit. On up to three occasions for these assignments, you will have an opportunity to revise for a better grade if you do not receive an A on the original. These revisions must be handed in within one week after the originals are returned to you.

Most of each class will be discussion. We intend that our discussions will honor the model of academic freedom, in which all have the opportunity to express their considered views and the obligation to listen with respect to others’ views. Our experience with freshmen is that many begin by relying very heavily on anecdotes from personal experience. We are not opposed to a limited amount of this–after all, much good thought and writing is grounded in personal knowledge. However, we will insist that all of you progress beyond the personal and the anecdotal to engage fully with systematic social science and policy analysis.

Each of you will be responsible for helping to lead the class discussion for a reading. One purpose for this approach is to prepare you for the style of advanced seminars; another is to help us better understand some complicated readings. We will distribute a sign-up list for the readings that will receive this treatment and a handout for how you should prepare.

And as you did last semester in the English class, we will also regularly discuss topical issues that you identify from readings in newspapers and other media sources. Our emphasis this semester, however, will be in connecting these issues to the policy analysis concepts and techniques covered in the class.

There are two final projects. The first is a capstone policy analysis. A capstone is an opportunity to integrate and apply what you have learned during the semester. This policy analysis is the only assignment for which you must read beyond the readings listed below. This will be a group assignment, and you should start early. You should form a group of 3 and pick a topic, which must be approved by Meyers. It must be on a U.S. domestic policy issue. Class meetings will periodically review your progress, and a whole session will be devoted to reviewing first drafts. You will make a presentation of your analysis to the class, and after revising this analysis based on reactions to your presentation, complete a written paper as your final writing assignment.

For the capstone analysis, you should propose a response to the issue or problem you identify. Present your proposal in the form of a memo to someone in real life who has some ability to adopt or implement your proposal. Your memo needs to define the issue, lay out your proposed response, identify major obstacles to the implementation of your solution, and recommend a specific course of action. Provide statistical data to put the issue in context and to support your recommendations. Cite major sources. The length should be seven to ten double-spaced pages.

Much of the previous paragraph is copied from the application for the Truman Scholarship, at: http://www.truman.gov/, which you should consider competing for in your junior year. Meyers has posted on the web some advice on plagiarism, at: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~meyers/plag.htm. Please read through this advice. You may also find helpful the following research hints page, at: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~meyers/reshints.htm.

Service-learning and related assignments

As during the fall, you will volunteer at your site 3-4 hours each week. Throughout the semester, you will reflect on your service experiences as observers at your sites. We will integrate your service experiences into class discussions as often as possible. You will participate in one-on-one advising sessions, and keep weekly logs of your observations. You will report back to the group via discussion boards: monthly journals, following the format of “What?” (reporting what happened, objectively); “So What?” (what did you learn, what difference did the event make?); and “Now What?” (how will you think or act as a result of this experience?), in about 200 words. The goal of the service learning journaling is for you to briefly reflect on what happens at your service site weekly and to participate electronically in your writing community by reading everyone’s posts and responding to at least 2 each month (hopefully more). Your original post will be due each Friday by midnight and the conversation should end by Tuesday morning. Discussion boards facilitate outside of class “discussion,” so when a question/request is posed to you, be sure to respond.

The second final assignment is a service-learning project. After choosing a topic of interest concerning your service site, you will gather information through observation and questioning in order to draw conclusions and make recommendations about possible changes needed at your service site. Your personal topic could be related to information/research you feel would benefit your site; policies that could be instituted to improve the function of your site; changes that would allow your site to better accomplish its mission—the purpose of your information gathering should be of specific interest to you and based in secondary research and your experiences at the site. After your purpose, questions, and methods are approved, you will collect information all semester during service and present your findings and recommendations during our final exam through poster sessions.

Grades

We do not “grade on a curve.” Every student can earn an A for excellence. If you find you are not performing at that level, we encourage you to discuss with us how you could improve.

Final grades will be calculated using the following percentages for each grading category:

Service-learning participation, reflections/journals, and poster session 25%

Class attendance and discussion participation 20%

Email, writing, and wiki assignments 40%

Capstone presentation and final policy analysis 15%

Readings

Three books should be purchased:

Eugene Bardach, 2009. A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving, third edition. D.C.: CQ Press.

John E. McDonough, 2000. Experiencing Politics: A Legislator’s Stories of Government and Health Care. Berkeley: University of California Press.

David L. Kirp, 2007. The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

The other readings are either web pages or on Blackboard. The web pages can be reached via the links embedded in this syllabus, at: http://userpages.umbc.edu/%7Emeyers/pub150h.htm.

Class schedule and assignments

1/27    Perspectives

            Vaclav Havel, “1990 New Year’s Address to the Nation,” at:

http://old.hrad.cz/president/Havel/speeches/1990/0101_uk.html

Havel was a playwright, philosopher, and human rights activist during the years of the Soviet empire. He became the new President of Czechoslovakia after the success of the “Velvet Revolution.” This speech is but one of many examples of his tremendous eloquence and moral drive. Now imagine that you have the opportunity to give a speech to a similarly-attentive audience about the “state of the nation”–in this case, the United States. What is the one thing you would most want to say, and why? See also Obama inaugural speech: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/inaugural-address/

1/29    Perspectives, continued; observation at your service-learning site

McDonough, Introduction and Chapter 1

Robert Coles, 1994. The Call of Service. Mariner Books, selected pages.

Bruce L. Berg, 2001. Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences. Allyn and Bacon, selected pages.

Email: What has/have been your formative political experience(s) to date?

2/3      Problem definition

            Bardach, Introduction and pp. 1-10

Email: For your web page from last semester, and the web page of one other group, identify the words that come closest to Bardach’s approach to defining a policy problem. Then use Bardach’s approach to rewrite problem definitions for the two topics.

http://home.comcast.net/~shouthouse/AAE/

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~mhall13/

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~ydewald1/Home.html

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~jcollaz1

2/5      Problem definition continued, for the global warming teach-in: Is carbon offsetting a policy solution or a policy problem?

            http://www.carbonfund.org/site/JK

Ted Williams, 2007. “As Ugly as a Tree,” Audobon, Setember, pp. 44-49.

http://www.cheatneutral.com/

Daniel S. Hall, 2007, “Offsets: Incentivizing Reductions While Managing Uncertainty and Ensuring Integrity,” Issue Brief #15, Resources for the Future, at : http://www.rff.org/rff/Publications/upload/31812_1.pdf

2/10    Backward mapping

Part 6 of the Washington Post’s series on Fixing D.C.’s Schools, at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/interactives/dcschools/

            Kirp, Introduction and Chapters 1-3 

2/12    Rhetoric and problem definition

McDonough, Chapter 2

President-Elect Obama’s “Your Seat at the Table”: http://change.gov/open_government/yourseatatthetable

Service-learning discussion board over the weekend and service-learning observation project proposal due to Delana

2/17    Problem indicators: poverty and inequality in the U.S.

Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis, and Eduardo Borges Martines, 2008, The Measure of America, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, pp. 120-149.