Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate

1st Place & CSU Competitior

Impacts of California's School Funding Mechanism

Shannon Swanson, Public Policy & Administration

Mentor, Dr. Shane Nordyke

2nd Place

The Creative Process of Policy Actors

Noella Handley, Pubic Policy & Administration

Mentor, Dr. Amal Kumar

Noella Handley

Noella is a master’s student in the Department of Public Policy and Administration. They are currently working on their culminating project about how policy actors think about and use stories in addition to working as an editorial assistant for the California Journal of Politics and Policy. They previously served as a member of the ASI Student Academic Senate and a member of the Graduate Student Advisory Committee as well as a student representative to the Faculty Senate. Before coming to Sac State, they earned a master’s degree in Linguistics from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and bachelor’s degrees in history and Linguistics from The College of William & Mary.

Executive Summary

The Creative Process of Policy Actors

Stories play an important role in the policy process by focusing attention on particular problems and proposed solutions. The formal analysis of stories, thus, has been an area of active study in policy scholarship, primarily through the lens of the narrative policy framework (NPF). The NPF contains a diverse body of scholarship focusing on the role of narrative in the policy process in fields as disparate as environmental policy, transportation policy, and education. Collectively, this scholarship has demonstrated both the flexibility of the Narrative Policy Framework in explaining policy change at multiple levels and emphasized the importance of policy, political, and relational contexts. Despite this progress, a significant unanswered question remains to what extent policy actors make planned, strategic decisions about their narrative choices. This project moves towards filling this gap. We therefore ask: how do policy actors make sense of their creative process while advocating for policy change?

This project employs qualitative methods to examine policy actors’ understandings of their narratives and communication strategies. Using the case study of California Assembly Bill 3129: Health care consolidation (2024) as an empirical context, we conduct semi-structured interviews with policy practitioners and advocates to elicit reflections about their use of storytelling in policy advocacy and use thematic coding to analyze the data. We find that our participants place importance on several concepts related to story. For example, they think of stories as one of multiple strategies in addition to approaches like data-based analyses and tailor their approach based on their audience. Additionally, many participants stressed the importance of people impacted by certain problems or policies telling their own stories, and talked about the process of finding and selecting those narrators and helping prepare them to testify and talk to legislators. Using the metaphor of play directors, we illustrate how certain kinds of policy actors act as intermediaries for how stories are shared and understood. This metaphor helps us think about stories in the policy process in a new way by focusing attention on the importance of story performance—who tells a story to whom in what context matters—a topic neglected by existing NPF scholarship. In addition to academic value, these findings are important for practitioners as well. “Directing” is a particular set of skills, so thinking about advocacy in those terms could help prompt policy actors to cultivate those skills.

Shannon Swanson

Shannon Swanson is in her final semester of Sacramento State's Master of Public Policy and Administration Program. She also serves as the Senior Outreach Specialist for Sac State's Center for California Studies, conducting recruitment and communications for the nationally recognized Capital Fellows Programs. Prior to this role, Shannon was a Policy Specialist at the Cal State Student Association and a Legislative Aide in the California State Assembly. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Sac State in 2020. Shannon was born and raised in Laguna Niguel, CA and has now lived in Sacramento for almost nine years.

Executive Summary

Impacts of California's School Funding Mechanism

This study examines whether school districts in higher-poverty areas allocate a greater share of planned spending toward high-need students under California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). Using district-level data and an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression framework with controls for socioeconomic factors, the analysis evaluates the relationship between the percentage of families living below the poverty line (independent variable) and planned spending on high-need students (dependent variable). Preliminary OLS findings with full controls show a positive and statistically significant relationship (coefficient = 0.0091679, p < .001), indicating that districts with higher poverty rates are, in fact, planning to allocate more funding toward high-need students—contrary to the initial hypothesis which predicted that school districts in areas of higher poverty rates are more likely to have lower levels of planned spending toward high-need students. These findings suggest that LCFF may be functioning more progressively than anticipated, though further investigation into implementation quality and regional variation remains critical to fully understanding equity outcomes.estify and talk to legislators. Using the metaphor of play directors, we illustrate how certain kinds of policy actors act as intermediaries for how stories are shared and understood. This metaphor helps us think about stories in the policy process in a new way by focusing attention on the importance of story performance—who tells a story to whom in what context matters—a topic neglected by existing NPF scholarship. In addition to academic value, these findings are important for practitioners as well. “Directing” is a particular set of skills, so thinking about advocacy in those terms could help prompt policy actors to cultivate those skills.