After his election as the incoming governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam organized a meeting of policy councils to speak to the major issues facing the Commonwealth. The group that day included students from the Batten School — not as observers, but as participants.

“We were talking with government agencies, lobby groups or advocacy groups… basically everybody,” says Andrew Pennock, public policy professor at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. “When the Northam administration held these councils, they said, ‘What do we need to know about your issue area? Where do we need to be thinking about making policy?’ The students were in the room and in that conversation with all of the policymakers in the state that matter. That was really an incredible experience.”

The students earned their way into those meetings as part of a one-semester project through Batten’s new Public Policy Lab. The lab allows Batten faculty members to design hands-on public policy research projects at a level of engagement below that of the yearlong projects that form the capstone for Masters candidates at Batten. In this case, the project was organized by Pennock and Raymond Scheppach. The effort had to begin long before the election.

“We have already done two full-day retreats for the last two governors, one Republican, one Democrat,” says Scheppach, public policy professor at the Batten School.

Virginia law allows only one term for governors, so at a time when most governors in other states are gearing up for reelection, those retreats helped each governor’s senior staff plan for finishing strong. The goodwill built up in those efforts, Scheppach says, allowed them to develop a package of projects for the 2017 election.

First, two Batten students helped organize the debate last October between Northam and his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie. Then, Scheppach and Pennock reached out to each candidate’s campaigns for a list of policy issues they wanted to pursue once the election was over.

“Andy and I had good relationships with a lot of these people,” Scheppach says. “So we had the credibility that allowed us to guide the students and help them make a real contribution.” The idea was to have students produce policy background briefs for key issues to help the winning campaign prepare for the transition to governing.

“At the presidential level, there’s a huge amount of government support for transitions between administrations,” Pennock says. “But at the state level, there is nothing, not even a dollar. So we decided to step into that gap.”

Based on inputs from both campaigns and their own research, the Batten team narrowed the list to 10 policy issues, ranging from oral health care to mass-transit funding in the D.C. corridor to coastal flooding, rural economic development and the opioid crisis.

The research team consisted of eight graduate students and one undergraduate from Batten as well as one undergraduate student from the Curry School of Education. Each was assigned a policy brief on one of the chosen topics, complete with a round of interviews in Richmond with policymakers and key stakeholders.

It’s not unusual for public policy students to write policy background briefs, Pennock says. But this time, they were writing for a real client—the next governor of Virginia. “The students worked so hard. It’s an amazing experience to be able to influence policy at the state level to write for real policymakers.”

When it comes to building leadership, nothing beats real experience.

“You can talk about leadership until you’re blue in the face. You can have people read about leadership until their eyes go blurry,” says Allan Stam, dean of the Batten School. “The only way to really learn, understand and internalize lessons with regard to judgment and teamwork is to have some significant part of your learning process be experiential rather than simply observational.”

After his arrival as dean in 2014, Stam comissioned a School-wide planning process to develop the School’s third strategic planning document, to cover from 2018 to 2023. Central to the document was a vision for what Stam describes as “public policy, version 3.0.”

Taking the long view, formalized public policy education traces back to the early 20th century, when policy programs were organized in the model of business schools. The emphasis then—version 1.0—was simply to build skills in public administration.

The global scale of World War II changed everything, including public policy. The war effort brought massive amounts of data and with it challenges that moved technology forward. The emergence of early computers in the years that followed allowed data to be compiled and compared, ushering in version 2.0. To the basis of administrative skill, the second wave of public policy education added the ability to understand and rigorously analyze data. This phase has largely informed policy education in the decades since its emergence.

Yet the ability to analyze anything has transformed into the mandate to analyze everything, Stam says.

“Today, any new rule, any new federal regulation has to be subject to cost-benefit analysis. Every proposed piece of legislation has to be scored by a nonpartisan policy analytic groups,” Stam says. “Now everybody’s so wrapped around the axle of unintended consequences that you can never fully disentangle. So today, a related but distinct problem is inefficiency in execution. We can’t seem to get anything done.”

When he made the initial gift that made the School possible, Frank Batten Sr. believed that one of the greatest shortcomings in our society is the failure to identify, recruit and train young people for leadership roles in their communities. The next phase of policy education—version 3.0, if you will—depends on adding a leadership component.

“We believe the next generation of schools will be focused on all three of these things,” Stam says. “Recognizing the administrative management aspects matter a great deal. Data is critical. The ability to do the cost-benefit analysis, to identify unintended consequences of policy changes, is essential. But then we need people with the tools to organize and lead others to actually accomplish these things. That’s the leadership challenge.”

As a part of the planning process, Stam has submitted the strategy document to faculty from several leading peer policy schools for their external feedback. “We are very encouraged,” Stam says, noting that the ideas in the document were “very well-received.”

“The mission that the School’s been charged with forces us to be innovative. Innovation is the pathway to outsized impact for any new organization,” Stam says. “Innovative ideas and innovative training will position your team to get ahead further, to move quicker, to have greater impact.”

The Batten School is organized around seven research and engagement centers, six of which routinely offer either direct exposure to policymakers or opportunities for experiential learning in public policy. (The seventh center, the Center for Effective Lawmaking, tracks laws proposed by every member of Congress, and thus is not in a position to offer experiential learning, per se - read more here.)

Following are examples of direct research or experiential learning within the research centers:

Center for Health Policy

In an environment where experiential learning is ubiquitous—medical and nursing schools are built around it—student experience in public policy is more rare. Yet Batten graduate and undergrad students are involved in research projects at the UVA Health System that range, as Dr. Michael Williams puts it, “from soup to nuts.”

The Center for Health Policy is a joint program of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Department of Public Health Sciences and the Batten School. In addition to serving as director of the Center, Williams is a surgeon whose clinical practice includes trauma and emergency surgery at the Health System. The Center’s unique structure, he says, provides significant opportunities for research experience.

For instance, several MPP (Master in Public Policy) candidates have done research in the office of the chief quality officer, “working literally in the front lines of quality metrics for the biggest health system in the state.”

Other students are engaged in a long-term research project to tie politicians’ voting records to specific health outcomes for their constituents.

There’s no national or local data set that connects that information, those data to real humans and their lives in Virginia or anywhere else,” Williams says. “We are positioning to be able to make those connections and—using patient-level clinical outcomes—predict the potential effects of the legislation in question.”

Center for Leadership Simulation and Gaming

In a real crisis, leaders don’t get a do-over. The leadership simulation Center builds immersive environments where people have to work together to make decisions in high-pressure scenarios.

For the second year, the Center has run an international competition sponsored by NASPAA, an international organization of graduate public policy schools. The 2018 version of the event involved more than 560 students competing in 16 sites across five continents. This year’s scenario challenged five-person teams with the outbreak of a global flu pandemic. If that weren’t enough, each 30 minutes of gameplay represented six months in the pandemic timeline.

“If you do nothing, people die,” says Noah Myung, director of the Center. “But if you do the wrong thing, more people die and that won’t be good.”

Yet in the end, no one died. The Center is currently working with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to bring a crisis simulation to a wider audience. The library has developed a role playing scenario where a fictional president is shot and taken to the hospital while the vice president is out of reach—a modernization of the assassination attempt on Reagan in 1981.

While the Reagan Library simulation places high value on authenticity, taking place in an exact replica of the White House Situation Room at the time, it has a downside: Participants have to be at the Reagan Library to experience it. The Center is developing a mobile version of the simulation.

“We are expanding the technology to so that you could play this at any location, any school,” he says. UVA has hosted the game five times so far.

Center for Education Policy and Workforce Competitiveness

EdPolicyWorks, as the Center is widely known, is a joint venture of the Batten School and the Curry School of Education. The Center’s research initiatives often include hands-on student participation.

“For me, there is a reason why you have a research center like EdPolicyWorks at a university and it's because the goals of developing students and doing high-quality research are closely aligned,” says Center director James Wyckoff.

Under the auspices of EdPolicyWorks, Batten and Curry offer a dual degree program that yields a PhD in education policy and an MPP degree in five to six years.

Several dual degree students have been involved in a long-term research project with the District of Columbia Public Schools, which is affecting the national conversation on teacher retention and teacher incentives.

“We get them involved in all aspects of the work,” Wyckoff says. “They are co-authors on papers that have been published about what is happening in D.C. They are full partners. It takes time, but our goal is that they start off as students and end up as colleagues.”

Founded by a gift from an entrepreneur, the Batten School has always had an entrepreneurial bent. By their choices, the first students bought into that idea.

“I really think that the newness of the School cultivated this real sense of ownership of the experience,” says Annie Rorem, a member of Batten’s first MPP class and chair of the School’s alumni advisory board. “Nobody was showing up at the Batten School knowing what to expect. That drove some people away, but the people who self-selected into it were entrepreneurial, willing to take responsibility and get involved.”

Only within the past year has the number of Batten alumni started to outnumber the currently enrolled students.

“We have a young and hungry network. We are all engaging in exciting ways and working hard to show our value to our employers,” says Rorem, who serves as deputy director of research and analysis for the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service. “We’re not senior career people, but we’re moving through the ranks and making a name for ourselves and for the Batten School.”

In the end, the key to “public policy, version 3.0” is to produce “3.0” policy graduates.

“We want to take this small School and have the greatest impact possible,” Stam says. “For that to happen, our students have to be people who are not trained to be mid-level managers, rank-and-file bureaucrats, but actually people who, over the course of their career, will grow into true leadership roles.”

Policy education emerged at the beginning of the 20th century to build skills in administering the public enterprise. As tools emerged, that mission grew into more deeply understanding the implications of policy. The 21st century brings with it a new challenge: mastering the art of making meaningful change happen.”