Alumni Profile: Adam Lechnir, MPP'16

Adam Lechnir, MPP’16, has always been driven by a singular goal: to break down the structural barriers that keep students from accessing a quality education.

“It’s really a moral commitment,” says Lechnir, the third of five children from a working-class family in East Dubuque, Illinois. “We didn’t have a whole lot of resources, so a lot of my family members and folks in my community really beared the brunt of our structural inequities. That informed what I do for a living.”

As a senior associate at Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, Lechnir trains school boards and superintendents to make more sound policy decisions. The goal is to install systems that will outlast the people involved—a crucial goal in school districts where superintendents and boards turn over every couple of years. “If you get in this endless cycle of churn, it’s not great for our higher-needs school districts who actually need stability the most,” Lechnir says. “That’s why I still do this work.”

After earning a Bachelor’s degree in political science and history from DePaul University, Lechnir helped launch the Illinois Student Assistance Commission Corps, a publicly funded start-up that focused on expanding college access for first-generation, low-income students like himself. At the age of 29, Lechnir landed at the Harris School of Public Policy older and more experienced than most of his classmates but found an intellectual environment that helped him think more analytically.

“You’re at Harris with students from all kinds of backgrounds and specializations—and others who came from other parts of the world,” Lechnir says. “When you are having debates with those folks, you’re able to see how these systems cross one another and the trade-offs that need to happen.”

In a finance class taught by Christopher Berry, the William J. and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor at Harris, Lechnir remembers a deep dive into the concept of fiscal common resource pools when Berry posed the question: Should Chicago invest in upgrading its technology to help traffic flow? Most students argued in favor. “Here I am with my background in education,” Lechnir says, “and I said, If we’re thinking about ROI and how we can reduce the impact more holistically on the amount of money that we’re putting on the safety nets, we should put money into pre-K education: it’s the best ROI. That’s the beauty of it: it all matters, and what we’re dealing with often is a trade-off situation.”

Post-Harris, Lechnir was selected into the prestigious Broad Residency in Urban Education and moved to Miami to lead strategy work and a youth violence prevention initiative as the executive director of the enormous Miami-Dade Public School system. There, he put to use lessons learned in his last quarter in a crime policy class taught by Jens Ludwig, now the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor and Pritzker Director of the Crime Lab. Tasked with leading an innovative approach to youth violence prevention, Lechnir brought together critical policy leaders including the mayor, the public defender, the juvenile justice department, school districts, and universities to share knowledge and work together.

“I took everything I learned at Harris and immediately had to apply it—and then the particular content knowledge that I had around violence prevention and crime policy that Jens taught,” Lechnir recalls. “I had credibility going into these spaces, but I had just learned it!”

He also leveraged his background in the municipal finance program at Harris to help the Miami-Dade school district manage a multi-billion-dollar budget. “I put myself in many uncomfortable positions and just challenged myself—that’s where I learned the best.”

After three years in Miami, Lechnir made the leap to the Chicago Public Schools, where he quickly rose to the deputy chief of staff, and ultimately, the chief of staff to the Chicago Board of Education—the largest school board in the country.

There, he spearheaded efforts transitioning from a mayorally appointed seven-member board to its current state, a hybrid 21-member school board (which will transition next year to a fully elected school board). This complicated project required him to navigate an extremely politicized environment.  He also helped to overhaul the governance structure and redesign the bylaws to be more inclusive.

To this end, he worked tirelessly to build genuine trust not just with large anchor institutions but with the people most directly affected by the school system: families and communities on the South and West sides. “Community-based organizations have been doing this work for many years in Miami and Chicago with a distrust of these large systems—and rightfully so, frankly,” says Lechnir. “So we went to them and showed we were trying to bring them into the policymaking table in an authentic way and wanted to listen to them as partners in this process.”

Lechnir describes it as “a different way of thinking about policymaking”: rather than crunching numbers and doing data analysis in some far-off room, he urged leaders to learn how data is experienced. “It’s easy to make a policy decision in a vacuum,” says Lechnir. “But when you bring people in early and actually listen to what they’re saying and talk about the historical disinvestment in their communities, that’s how you build more durable systems.”

Harris didn’t simply give Lechnir the tools to propel himself into executive leadership roles and influence policy; it also provided a tight community—including his now wife, Allison Weil Lechnir, MBA'17, MPP'17.

“There are quite a few of us, I think maybe 15 or 20, who met each other at Harris and got married,” he says. “Now we’re raising little policy analysts and policy leaders.”

One of his most indelible memories include a school-funded Super Bowl party in the former Harris building during a blizzard. “City buses had shut down and were abandoned in the middle of the street, so we locked arms and went going against the wind all the way from Woodlawn to student housing on 51st Street,” Lechnir recalls. It’s those experiences, intentionally or unintentionally, that Harris creates—and we take it from there.”

They became his closest friends.

Lechnir and his wife are currently busy with their two young children, but in his spare time he’s a big reader of non-fiction. On his nightstand at the moment: Jens Ludwig’s Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence. “What he says around gun policy and crime policy, it’s both about reducing access to guns and about the social safety net,” says Lechnir. He didn’t go into Harris thinking about crime policy, but after Ludwig’s class, he finds it relevant in his professional life again and again—living proof of his suggestion to Harris students to stay willing to veer from their path.

“Yes, you should spend your time learning the econometrics and sound program evaluation,” he says. “But also put yourself in uncomfortable situations and lean in with curiosity. Whether it’s a different class, a different student group, or a career opportunity where you’re like, ‘You know what? Maybe it doesn’t pay as well, but it’s a smaller team and I’m going to be able to do a lot more.’ That’s what I did, post-Harris.”