Texas Policy Report:
Project description:
Formal Assessment Guidelines After reading the chapters and topics covered in this course, you should havebeen presented with an opportunity to discuss how policy is adopted, how it can be shaped and whether it succeeds in solving the problem(s) it was intended to tackle.
This assignment is the primary assessment of your learning in this course
Public policymaking involves five major steps:
1. Agenda Setting: Deciding which issues to discuss
2. Policy Formulation: Crafting of proposed courses of action
3. Policy Adoption: Approval of a policy proposal
4. Policy Implementation: Process of carrying out public policies
5. Policy Evaluation: Did policy achieve its goals?
You are expected to consider an issue meaningful to you and then investigate the specific process of how legislation affecting this issue is created and passed.
Select a bill that passed both chambers (Texas House and Senate) and was signed into law. Your chosen bill/law must be related to a Texas and not federal law.
Describe the background leading to the adoption of the policy, the legislative process, and the parties that influenced the process at the grass-roots, interest groups and political leadership levels. Give details in your essay about how these parties influenced the discussion and adoption of the bill.
Your discussion should incorporate the above 5 steps and a discussion of the workings of the legislative process of the bill, as well as any special sessions involved, the power of special interests to support or oppose the bill, the media, and the Governor’s signing or not of this bill.
Each student is expected to utilize high quality sources (a minimum of four (4) scholarly articles from a peer-reviewed academic journal, current laws/policy, court cases, newspaper articles, etc.). There is a tool built into the course to help you obtain quality sources for your writing assignment, it is labeled Research Center on the main menu of the course. For current events related information, use a newspaper, news magazine or news website. The course textbook, Wikipedia, internet search engines, blogs and similar items are examples of unacceptable research sources for this assignment. Failure to identify sources is plagiarism.
The format of your essay must be MLA or APA, minimum writing requirement is three double spaced 12 point word-processed pages in your own words (excluding citations, cover page and bibliography/works cited). Anything less than the minimum writing expectations will be considered incomplete and will result in a zero.
The following web site could serve as an additional source for you to explore a particular area of policymaking and track the various steps of the bill:
https://www.capitol.state.tx.us/resources/FollowABill.aspx