This past week at Advancing Justice, I learned more about the steps involved in going from a policy idea to an actual bill that gets approved in the state legislature. My mentor, Ben Tran, started by teaching me how to read the actual text of a bill currently pending further action on the Assembly floor: Senate Bill No. 309. Senate Bill No. 309 repeals a former grant and establishes a new grant to be used to help California students complete the A-G requirements and become eligible to apply for universities in the CSU and UC systems. The bill additionally requires that school districts give students all the resources they would need to fulfill A-G requirements, and further asks that high schools tell the parents of 8th graders what A-G requirements can be fulfilled at their school. In short, it’s an important bill that ensures continued funding for an impactful way the state of California maintains a high quality of education for all its students.
My first pass reading the bill, I definitely missed certain crucial details, while overemphasizing other less important sections. It was a challenge to parse through the ‘legalese’ of the written bill, and Ben later told me that the bills are actually written by attorneys at the Office of Legislative Counsel. As we analyzed the bill, trying to understand its potential impacts, Ben gave me a very simple and useful framework for understanding the implications of a given bill. He emphasized the importance of just looking at what impact the bill has for real people. Ideally, a bill is supposed to either reduce a certain amount of a bad thing or increase a certain amount of a good thing. Reading the bill, you have to ask, does it do either of those things? Are there any further obstacles to attaining this goal when it is implemented in real communities?
Reading and analyzing the bill in this way was a really eye-opening experience. Though we often get the gist of recently passed laws when we see the summary of a summary published in news articles, I think there’s a lot of value to reading and understanding the original policy proposal. We are all so directly impacted by the work done in our state legislature–I know I remember completing my A-G requirements in high school. Fully understanding the entirety of a bill can only be a net positive in helping us understand the importance of state-level advocacy.
After reading through the bill, I spent the rest of my internship time this week working to create connections with other non-profit organizations doing advocacy work and offering services to Asian Americans/immigrants in our area. I emailed, called, and left voicemails at different organizations and tried to set up meetings that would help us foster relationships with other people doing similar work. We want to hear from the people who directly work with individuals that take advantage of immigration, family law, counseling, health care enrollment and other services to learn from them the challenges they face in attaining their goals. I’ve already been able to schedule a few meetings with other organizations and I really look forward to spending the coming weeks listening to the people with first-hand experience helping those who are struggling in our community.
Understanding the historical struggles that inform our globalized society.