School Quality, Accountability, and Change Management in Chicago Public Schools

This course will offer students a chance to go into the weeds of one specific Chicago policy making initiative; namely Chicago Public Schools’s effort to redesign its approach to accountability since 2019. The complexity of the topic being tackled, the unprecedented (for the institution) level of stakeholder engagement informing the process, and the amount of consensus reflected in final policy make this a case study that should help students think through some of the key elements of effective policy making. Students will also be expected to research other instances of policy making in compare and contrast exercises in order to evaluate which of the lessons learned from the CPS case study are more widely applicable and to what extent.