A-100 Introduction to Educational Policy
Jal Mehta
This course is designed to introduce students to educational policy debates, with a particular focus on the major issues and challenges facing U.S. policymakers. This class is strongly recommended for students in the Education Policy and Management master’s program, but we also strongly welcome the perspectives of students from other programs. We will examine standards-based, market-driven, professionally led, and networked models of reform, looking at their theories of change, implementation challenges, and the critiques leveled against these approaches. We will examine a variety of recent reform efforts at both the federal and the state levels, with particular attention to No Child Left Behind and the debates around its reauthorization. We will consider issues such as leadership and change, teacher unions, and community engagement. We will also examine examples of good practice from other countries and from other fields as a way to stimulate creative thinking about reform. We end the course by looking towards the future, considering how the forms, values, and emphases of current schooling are likely to change in the years to come. As much as possible, the course will be interactive and student-directed; each class will feature considerable time for discussion, and paper topics will be chosen by students to match their interests. By the end of the course, students will have learned critical “policy skills” (such as writing policy memos), and equally importantly, they will have reached informed conclusions about what they think a better school system might look like and what the leverage points are for achieving those ends.
This course is also offered by the Kennedy School of Government as HLE-122.
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(Some resources on the course Web site may require a Harvard PIN number)