Fall 2006 Course Description
Policy Research Project
Description: The 80th Regular Session of the Texas Legislature will spend considerable time on school issues. Two are likely to be contentious. One is funding public education, including higher education. The other is the Texas Top 10% Rule (HR 588, Uniform College Admission Policy), and the continuing attempt to abolish or change it. Both issues provide the backdrop for this research project.
The project will track and monitor the work of key House and Senate legislative committees during the 80th Regular Session. The project will also continue developing a set of GIS (geographic information system) tools. The GIS package of interactive maps can used to display the number of graduates each public high school in Texas sends to the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University, College Station.
The project's broad goal is to help students expand both technical research skills and ways of understanding anti-discrimination policy. The general technical objective is to become more comfortable and confident using geo-spatial analysis (i.e., geographical information systems). The specific task here is twofold. One is update data sets of information on Texas public high schools and the social-demographic characteristics Texas communities. The other is to create interactive maps of Texas and its geographic sub-units that can be used interactively to display the distribution of different variables. Geo-spatial analysis is another way to say social problems are concrete and exist in specific places. You can see the problem on a map!
The objective as regards social policy is to better understand school-related anti-discrimination policies. Problems around access to quality schools and the persistence of the so-called achievement gap are both simple and complex. They are simple in that housing, which is place specific, largely determines the quality of a given school, which is also place specific. Housing, in turn, is closely tied to capital credit markets and practices. The complex part is reconciling the claim that schooling is a public good while we treat it as a private interest commodity, particularly as regards higher education and its elite universities.
The project's narrow research focus is Texas' flagship universities, The University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M at College Station. This focus is really an institutional analysis of the admission policies of elite universities and how they are developed, implemented, and managed. The University of Texas is often ground zero when quakes create significant shifts in state and national higher education policy. HR 588 is a recent example in a long, begrudging struggle to expand access to elite (public) universities.
There are no formal prerequisites for the course. However, students must prepare to quickly and actively engage each other and the research tasks. See me if you have questions.
Return to Fall 2006 Course Schedule
