1 Course Title: Social Policy Development and Enactment Course Number: SW 671, Section 001 (29240) Day & Time: Thursday, 9am – 12pm Course Room: 3752 SSWB Term: Winter 2012 Professor: Robert J. Miller Phone: 734-645-9841 School Office: Room 2740 E-Mail Address: [email protected] Use 671 on the subject line when corresponding with me so I can identify an e-mail for this course Course Description This course will review the overall design of human service systems, how to plan for and design such systems, how to develop the legislative mandates and regulations that operationalize these designs, and how to facilitate their formal enactment. Students will learn the analytic skills associated with the development of policies that give specification to human service systems, as well as the more interactional skills associated with facilitating the enactment of these policies. Course Content Human service systems include a variety of separate programs, differing legislative mandates, and extremely complicated implementation procedures and processes. This course will present skills associated with the design of complex human service systems in the nonprofit, public and for-profit sectors. System design involves networks of services, agencies, and clients. Therefore, this course will move beyond the individual agency and the single program and in the direction of complex multi-program and multi-system systems. Since the “stock in trade” of policy professionals engaged in most design and enactment tasks is the written policy document, this course will place a heavy emphasis on the skills associated with the preparation of documents, such as memos, briefing papers, policy specification papers, legislative drafts, and program regulations and guidelines. A student seeking to understand how complex systems are designed and enacted needs to have a clear idea of the process needed to achieve desirable results. Accordingly, this course will focus on both the analytic skills associated with the development of policies which give specification to human service systems, as well as the interactional skills associated with facilitating the enactment of these policies. As a result, students will examine the transitioning of private matters into public policy.2 Special emphasis will be placed on systems that serve special populations. Students will study one major system serving a special population (e.g., income maintenance, juvenile justice, services for the aging, mental health, and corrections), and perform a series of assignments that will enable them to understand, diagnose, and make suggestions for change of the system. Students will analyze global policy in consideration of independent nationalistic policies and their interdependence within global political systems. Course topics may include: policy concepts and terms; cycles for developing policies; diagnosing policy environments (e.g., bureaucratic, fiscal, legislative, community) and advocacy roles (e.g., political, scientific, and ideological); professional standards and ethics that impact on the selection of advocacy roles; analyzing complex systems (e.g., issue identification and option generation); preparing and enhancing utilization of policy documents; use of quantitative and qualitative data in policy documents; developing policy (e.g., drafting legislation, writing guidelines and administrative regulations, and developing feedback mechanisms); selling policy (e.g., lobbying, testifying, and building coalitions of support). Course Objectives Upon completion of the course, students will be able to: 1. Use the major analytic tools most commonly used to assess and evaluate complex systems of human and social services. 2. Use interactional tools and techniques for facilitating group process and decision making. 3. Design a procedure for reviewing and assessing a social service system that encompasses a wide variety of separately mandated programs. 4. Develop and evaluate a reasonable set of options (policy recommendations) for changing a particular service system. 5. Design and implement a preliminary political strategy for facilitating enactment of the preferred option. 6. Organize and prepare different types of policy documents and/or policy recommendations. 7. Discuss the effect of individual positionalities on policy development and their influence across system levels. 8. Discuss typical ethical concerns related to social policy development and enactment. Course Design This course will include lectures, tape recordings, student papers, special projects, and presentations. The course will be enhanced by extensive class discussion. Theme Relation to Multiculturalism and Diversity: Students will develop the capacity to identify ways in which diversity dimensions “ability, age, class, color, culture, ethnicity, family structure, gender (including gender identity and gender expression), marital status, national origin, race, religion or spirituality, sex, and sexual orientation, as well community of residence” and other forms of social stratification and disenfranchisement influence and are impacted by the social policy development and enactment process.3 Theme Relation to Social Justice: Students will learn that the ability to develop and enact social policy is necessary if the social work profession is to play an important role in shaping the outcome of ongoing policy debates to reflect issues in social justice and change. This course will provide students with the capacity to participate in the social policy development and enactment process. Theme Relation to Promotion, Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation: Students will learn that policies in human services are too often implemented in reaction to an issue, not proactively, due to changing social, economic, and political circumstances and influences. Promotion, prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation activities are difficult to evaluate and therefore raise special challenges in social policy implementation. Students will be exposed to effective development and enactment techniques (e.g., responsive focus groups, Delphi method, and nominal group techniques) that can be used to develop and implement promotion, prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation activities. Theme Relation to