EDUC POLICY: NYC & CLIMATE/COVID CRISIS

This course is designed to provide students with a deeper understanding of the processes, players, and purposes of educational policy.  It asks us to consider and reconsider the ways that we generally conceptualize educational policy from idea to implementation. Rather than taking a content-specific approach where we might study different forms of educational policy, such as language policy, school choice, and special education, I have designed the course to think collectively and deeply about the long-arc of injustice, inequity, possibility, and resistance from historical redlining to the climate/covid crisis as well as the actors who create, revise, and sustain educational policy in formal and informal educational spaces. As we do this, we will be asking you to think about a particular content area and how we might reimagine the policies in this area as we face the multipronged crisis of a planet that is burning amidst a global pandemic. While much of the reading is centered in the United States, we encourage you to think broadly about the global impact that educational policy has on the lives of educators, families, and youth and how these policies have the power to both replicate and dismantle inequities in our world.

Learning Objectives

• Students will understand how to critique and use both qualitative and quantitative methods in policy research and policy writing.
• Students will be able to assess the strengths and limitations of different media sources, policy reports, academic scholarship, journalism articles, opinion pieces, documentary films, etc. and think critically about the media that they want to employ in their final project.
• Students will generate a policy brief that outlines a policy problem and generates a research-based solution.