Chapter 8GETTING THE WORDS AND THE

MONEY: POLICY FORMULATION AND POLICY

ADOPTION

Focus Questions

• In what government arenas are policies expressed in words and adopted?

• Why are some policies mandated but not funded?

• How can school leaders influence policy formulation and adoption?

THE HIGH VISIBILITY STAGES OF THE POLICY PROCESS

• Although the first two stages of the policy process occur so quietly that they are almost invisible to the general public, the third and fourth stages-formulation and adoption-occur in more visible arenas.

• In deed, when most people hear the word politics, this is one of the two political processes that they think of.

• The other, of course, is elections. Policy formulation and adoption constitute the heart of most government and political science courses and attract ongoing attention from the media.

• They are the parts of the policy process about which school leaders feel best informed and that they are most likely to seek to influence.

• Yet, even familiar territory can conceal unexpected surprises.

• During policy formulation and adoption, three major processes occur.

• First and in many ways most important, the policy is expressed in written language, taking the form of a statute, an administrative rule, or a court decision.

• This process is never easy because words have a range of meanings and can be interpreted in several ways.

• People who formulate policy language are acutely aware of the fact that such details as the choice of may rather than must or the definition of day will affect a law’s range of possible interpretation.

• It will also affect the level of support available for the policy in the legislature and its chances of being adopted at all.

• During both policy formulation and policy adoption, mighty battles are often fought over word choice, the inclusion of a phrase, and punctuation marks.

• Although these battles may appear trivial to the uninitiated, they are not; major policy issues can hang on a preposition or a semicolon.

• When a legislature formulates a policy, wording is not the only issue at stake; because legislatures control the government’s purse strings, funding is equally important.

• Neither the U.S. Congress nor the 50 state legislatures are required to fund all the policies for which they adopt official wording.

• Alas, school leaders of today are all to familiar with the unfunded mandate.

• Finally, a policy as formulated in words must be adopted. In a legislature this means that a majority of both houses must vote for it and that the executive must sign it.

• Policy language is often adopted in two arenas other than legislatures: administrative agencies and courts.

• Administrative agencies write rules that guide the implementation of statutes; agencies write operating procedures indicating majority of a group of judges sitting in a given court must approve their rules.

• In the courts, the majority of a group of judges sitting in a given court must approve a particular written decision.

• Sometimes a judicial decision must move through a series of courts, being scrutinized by several panels of judges in succession as an appeals process plays out before the final wording of the decision is determined.

• 1. Title • 2. Text that enacts the legislation• 3. Definitions of key terms• 4. Effective date• 5. List of portions of existing legal code

potentially affected

Figure 8.1 Major components of a correctly drafted bill

The Politics of Getting a Policy Adopted

• Sponsorship.• Reference Committee.• Standing Committee.• Rules Committee.• Conference Committee• Obtaining Funding

• The person who has a legislative proposal must select sponsors with care. Although any legislator can introduce a bill into her own house, not every legislator makes a good sponsor.

• Obviously, the sponsor should be a person known to support policies similar to the one being proposed.

• A business group that wishes to have a bill introduced to increase the number of math courses required for high school graduation will probably look for sponsors among legislators who have supported higher academic standards in the past.

Sponsorship

• After introduction, a bill is always sent to a committee or to a leader of the house who decides to which standing committee it will be assigned.

• This is an important decision because bills undergo their most important revisions in committee; in fact, most die there.

• This decision is so crucial that legislative policy actors do not leave it to change; formally or informally, the leadership of the house always decides where a bill will be sent.

Reference Committee

• If the leaders strongly oppose a bill, they will send it to one of those convenient committees known as “killer” or “death” committees, not to be heard of again.

• A lesser degree of opposition may be expressed by keeping a bill in Reference Committee for an unusually long time; after all, the later it sent to a standing committee, the more likely it is to die at the end of a session.

• Many possible fates-mostly bad-await the flood of bills that surges onto the agenda of the typical standing committee of a U.S. legislature.

• An unlucky bill may be “laid on the table”, amended beyond recognition, indefinitely postponed, or sent to another committee.

• Bills that have a brighter future are scheduled for hearings.

Standing Committee

• These are meetings-normally open to the public-at which experts on the substantive content of the bill testify before the members of the standing committee, providing them with information and answering their questions.

• Hearings may be held in or near the capitol building or out in the field, in which case they are called field hearings.

• A novice might imagine that the rest of the process will be smooth sailing for any bill that, triumphant over dozens of lesser bills, has finally managed to receive a majority vote from a standing committee.

• Not so. Although its prospects of becoming law are far brighter than when it entered the standing committee, it must now face another procedural hurdle, either the Rules Committee.

• The Rules Committee has been called the traffic cop of the legislature because it regulates the flow of legislation to the floor for debate and voting.

Rules Committee

• The last major hurdle many bills must cross is the Conference Committee. Obviously, even if identical bills were originally introduced in each house of the legislature, by the time they emerge from their respective houses months later, they are no longer the same.

• Yet, in order to become a law, identical bills must be approved by both houses.

• Often this task can be accomplished informally, but controversial or major legislation frequently must of to a conference committee whose task is to work out disagreements.

Conference Committee

Think and Learn1. Questions and activities for discussion

• 1.1 Identify three sources in your state that provide information about the activities of the state legislature. Contact them and discuss your findings with your class.

• 1.2 Contact the SDE in your state and ask what provisions, if any, it makes for the participation of educators in rule making. Discuss your findings with your class.

• 1.3 Visit a public or university library and list the most useful government documents related to policy formulation and adoption in your state that you can find in the collection.

• 1.4 Develop a plan for building better relations between your school district or building and area government officials involved in policy formulation and adoption.

2. Case study: The Gadfly• As he moved into the last decade of his

professional career in a Midwestern state, Superintendent Jack Donato became increasingly disgruntled about education policy trends.

• Although he was comfortably ensconced in a district with several booming shopping malls and no financial woes, all around him he saw school systems on the verge of bankruptcy and increasing poverty among schoolchildren.

• Yet, at both the national and state levels, politicians were blaming educators and developing policies to reward high test scores and punish low ones.

• Jack launched his first attack about seven years before his retirement, when the state legislature passed an education reform act establishing an interdistrict often enrollment program to improve schools through competition.

• He worked with the regional section of the state superintendents’ association to created workshops on the new law, inviting legislators, SDE representatives, and out-of-state critics of open enrollment to speak to school administrators about it.

• Next, he persuaded another superintendent to file suit against the state with him; they challenged the portion of the law that required every district to send demographic data about students and their test scores to the SDE, alleging a violation of privacy rights.

• In the state capital, these activities earned Jack the nickname, “the Gadfly,” but Jack didn’t care.

• Although the lost his court case, Jack continued his crusade. In order to raise questions about the way political and business leaders had defined education problems, he and his district sponsored a lecture series, inviting national figures such as Gerald Bracey, David Berliner, and Bruce Biddle to speak about alternative perspectives on public education and its problems.

• During the year the retired, Jack was distributing information about the legislature’s proposed voucher plan to his teachers and urging them to let legislators know their opinion of it.

• Of course, the teachers were well aware of Jack’s strong opposition.

• When the Gadfly retired, the legislature was still considering vouchers, but Jack felt that he had fought the good fight.

Questions:

• 1. What aspects of Jack’s personal and professional situation permitted him to take strong stands? Describe a more subtle campaign that a differently situated leader might have waged.

• 2. Describe Jack’s use of coalitions and allies as well as his attempts to influence all three policy formulation and adoption arenas.

• 3. To what extent did Jack choose the best stage of the policy process for his interventions? How might he have sought to influence the policy process at an earlier stage?

• 4. What legal and ethical questions might be raised about Jack’s activities?

3. Pro-con debate: Should school services be privatized?

• YES: Public schools perform many services that have little to do with educating children-food service, janitorial work, transportation, management, and so forth.

• Everyone knows that the private sector is more efficient than the rigid and bureaucratic public one, so why not just privatize all the noneducational aspects of education?

• Let the market work its magic, motivating school service providers and administrators to provide good service at the lowest possible cost.

• Soon we would see a more businesslike atmosphere and a keener concern for customers and their needs.

• They would have to be responsive to the market, or they would not survive. Privatization would therefore improve our children’s education and save taxpayers money at the same time.

• NO: Most arguments for the privatization of school services and management are based on ideology rather than on evidence.

• The growing body of research on privatization-especially the privatization of school management-suggests that it neither improves education services nor save money.

• The fact is that the private sector is not well suited to carry out some activities, and the provision of universal education is one of them.

• The reason is clear: Children are not packages to be transported from place to place or cows waiting to be fed.

• Every aspect of their schooling is potentially educational. Therefore, these services should not be under the control of private corporations whose overriding concern is making a profit.

The End