Politics and Public Policy in the United States

Classroom Activities

The larger intention of this unit is to allow students to think creatively about policy, how policy is created, and how we can improve the lives of the people in our city, our country, and around the world. It is my hope that not only will students begin to understand how we can make systems that allow us to be healthier and happier, but that they can further understanding developing an expertise and skills to really make changes happen. The unit will go through three phases, first students will examine what the research says about being healthy. This will involve a look at what policies and practices exist in our country and around the world, including, but not limited to healthcare. This will give students the opportunity to brainstorm what they would like to see happen. Once have they have done that, they will examine potential policies within the United States that could improve public health. And then as they begin to prepare for creating and planning action steps for their own policy, they will examine various analytical tools to really investigate what goes into making policy. Each lesson detailed here plays a significant role in each phase of the unit.

Activity: Sociology and Science Meet

In the first activity of this unit, students will divide into two groups. Group A will receive resources regarding the science behind a long and healthy life. They will read, discuss, and prepare to share with a partner the current research on telomeres and the habits that support health at the cellular level. Group B will receive sociological research regarding the habits that those populations with longest lived populations practice a daily basis around the world. Group B will also prepare to share with a partner from Group A.

Once each group is ready, they will partner up with somebody from the opposite group and compare and contrast the research of the scientists and the research of the sociologists. It will hopefully be apparent to the students that both of these groups reported similar findings, despite participating in different methods of research. They will also hopefully be able to build on each other’s knowledge to develop a fairly in-depth knowledge of what we can each do to live a healthier life.

Following this activity, students will begin a brainstorming period to begin to answer the question, how do we support healthy lives. They will have to opportunity to discuss with peers and research cultural practices and policy around the world that contribute to higher rates of health and happiness. This may include access to preventative healthcare coverage, but we will be open to creative takes on helping people achieve health through other types of policy as well.

Activity 2: How policy can impact health for the better

Through examination of Dr. Nadine Burke Harris’s work and screening recommendations students will be able to examine how wide scale implementation of a policy could improve health in children

During this activity, students will read excerpts from Dr. Nadine Burke Harris’s book The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma to better understand how stress can negatively impact our health and how doctors can use a quick set of questions to help screen for these negative impacts in children. Through Dr. Burke Harris’s work, research, and advocacy for a universal screening of childhood trauma, children can be better supported to achieve long term health, both physically and mentally. Students will use a think-pair-share to read the excerpts independently and track their reactions through annotation, share their ideas with a partner, and then share in a whole class discussion about their thoughts on how small (and cost effective) changes can improve overall health.

Students will take this opportunity to re-examine the ideas that they developed during the initial brainstorming period and think about how to refine their ideas and how they could actually be implemented.

As part of this activity, in small groups, we will begin to analyze current data around public health within the United States, specifically referencing the information on health in the United States and the factors that impact it across various sectors of the American Public.

It is important for students to begin having real conversations about how bias, prejudice, and inequality create health inequality, in addition to economic inequality. Students should begin to and continue to raise their awareness of inequality within our society during this activity and throughout the unit.

Analytical Tools and coalition building

During this activity, students will have the opportunity to experiment with a series of analytical tools and coalition building. The activities will be based on thought experiments presented in the Yale National Seminar on Public Policy with Dr. Ian Shapiro and scaffolded for the high school classroom.

First students will participate in a physical representation of the “divide a dollar game.” Students will work in groups of three. Each group will be given an envelope with various coins that add up to one dollar.⁵⁶ They will also have a set of questions to prompt their discussion. This question set will include questions like, “What is the most even way to divide the dollar between three people?”, “Is there a way for two people to get more of the dollar?”. “What could the third person do in response?”, and “Would the use of the money change who should get more?”.

We will then engage in a class discussion about each of these questions, giving students the opportunity to share their thoughts on the activity and its application to the real world. As the discussion progresses, students will turn towards how this “game” may play out in the political arena and in political thought across the country.

Next, students will participate in a hypothetical situation in which they will analyze their own perspective on loss aversion also presented in the Yale National Seminar lead by Dr. Shapiro. The students will be presented with two scenarios. In one, a person is told that they are the winner of a two million dollar lottery. The next day, the person finds out that, actually, there was another winning ticket and the winning amount will have to be split between two people, meaning they only won one million dollars. In a second scenario, a person is told that possess one of two winning tickets for a one million dollar lottery and they will receive five hundred thousand dollars. The next day, they are notified that there was only one winning lottery ticket, so they actually won one million dollars. Students will explain who is happier.⁵⁷

Once they have explained who is happier and why, they will begin to discuss in pairs how this may play out in real life and politics. They will have a question set that includes more personal questions, like, “how may this apply to your own life?” and “have there been any situations in which you have felt that you didn’t want to lose something?” and a more political question set that includes questions like, “how might a politician use this principal to frame their campaign?” and “how might this principal affect if a policy is put into place?” or “how might this impact a policy that some politicians want to get rid of?”

Finally, students will be introduced to both the median voter theorem and the building blocks of coalition building through a short power point presentation. Throughout the presentation, students will be introduced to the reason that the United States does not have universal healthcare coverage and a possible solution for expanding coverage to more people. This will serve a model for how to examine how a policy may become a reality, how is politics involved, and adding more layers onto the traditional lessons of how a bill becomes a law. The thought experiments presented earlier in the lesson will begin to be applied as well.

Students will then participate in a practice scenario in applying these concepts to a hypothetical school policy. They will have the opportunity to begin to apply this knowledge on a small scale in order to prepare for the larger final unit project that will come in the following weeks.