Mary Lenz

Armando A. Gonzalez, deputy commissioner of Region 6 of the Social Security Administration, visited the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs recently. His purpose was not to explain social security reform to students. Instead, he was briefed by competing teams of students representing different groups with interests in social security reform.

The student presentations, in turn, were judged by a panel consisting of Arnold Garcia, editor of the Austin American-Statesman's opinion page, Jim McDaniel, district manager of the Social Security Administration in Austin, Dr. Howard Prince, a professor of ethical leadership at the LBJ School, and Dr. Patrick Wong, an LBJ School associate professor of social welfare policy.

The team briefing exercise is part of the requirement for completion of the Master of Public Affairs Program section on policy development, taught by Dr. Jacqueline Angel, an assistant professor at the LBJ School, and Dr. Victoria Rodriquez, an associate professor at the school. The purpose is to improve student political and analytical skills in dealing with real social policy problems.

Gonzalez, who was charged with providing questions and critiques of the student presentations, said he hoped the experience would give "some of (the students) an idea that, hey, maybe I need to take a look at going to work for the government."

The students were assigned to work in teams of five or six to prepare and deliver a 15-minute briefing, including Power Point slides, representing the views of real groups with interests in the social security debate. The students presented the views of groups including the New Braunfels Women's Chamber of Commerce, the League of Women Voters of Texas, the National Hispanic Council on Aging-Houston Chapter and Third Millennium, a non-partisan group of younger American professional. Evaluations were based on the oral presentations, peer review and a briefing booklet prepared in advance.

During the presentations, Gonzalez commented several times that material the interest groups provided to the students indicated the groups did not have current information on issues involving social security reform. For example, several interest groups said they objected to the idea of raising the age of mandatory retirement. In fact, the U.S. Congress already has voted to raise the retirement age to 67 by the year 2022.

Angela Hernandez, a Colton, Calif., student in her first year of a joint degree program in Latin American Studies and Public Affairs, compared the difference between doing a term paper and participating in the team briefing with real government officials present to the difference between "the telephone and the web. It gives you that real world experience. It's made the educational process much more valuable and more tangible than if I had just read it out of a book."

Stefie Gold, of Little Rock, Ark., is a first-year LBJ student interested in social policy with a special emphasis on health care. She said the "biggest difference probably is learning to work in a group and having to depend on other members of the group to advise you. A lot of what you do is synthesize information that other people in the group present to you. It's not necessarily material you've mastered yourself."

Angel said the exercise was not intended to teach original research skills. Instead, the exercise was meant to help students develop a better understanding of the policy making process, along with ways to package materials so that the individual being briefed is "well-equipped to deal with interest groups who can be really tough and really vocal.

"The challenge of the exercise is to meet the academic objective of policy development, to have a focused intense exercise and to have the students learn to integrate this kind of exercise in their other courses," she said. "Some of the students were very innovative."

The exercise also teaches students to work effectively in small groups, to prepare professional presentations, to move from understanding an issue to taking action on the issue and to get access to experts who can address their issue from a variety of perspectives.

"From the students' written evaluations, it's clear that they found these activities helped to achieve these goals," Angel said.