Univ. of Chicago IOP Policy Challenge
The Paul Simon Public Policy Institute is partnering with the University of Chicago Institute of Politics to solicit undergraduate student-generated policy proposals for an inter-collegiate policy challenge competition on the topic, “Resetting K-12: Closing the Post-Pandemic Learning Gaps.” The winning team will represent the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute and Southern Illinois University at the IOP’s national competition in February 2027 in Chicago. All participants will be given a t-shirt, and the winning group will each receive $500 per team member.
Questions? Contact the Institute at paulsimoninstitute@siu.edu with any questions you may have.
This contest is exclusively for students at Southern Illinois University. All SIU students, including graduate students, are invited to participate. Each team is required to have at least (1) undergraduate student.
This is a national contest facilitated by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. Learn more about the IOP and their programming by visiting their website.
Fall 2026 Policy Challenge
Resetting K-12: Closing the Post-Pandemic Learning Gaps
American public school children have broadly failed to recover from large-scale disruptions to learning during the Covid pandemic, and states and local districts are struggling to help students pull out. Reading skills of American high school seniors are
the worst they have been in three decades, according to federal testing data, and many scored below basic math proficiency as well. The rise of heavy screen time and video-dominated media — which all predate the pandemic — has further eroded learning. The impacts stretch across well-funded districts to poor ones, across urban, suburban, and rural districts, and across racial divides. As the federal government retreats from its role in K-12 education, states and localities find themselves with both an obligation and an opportunity to right their respective ships. Mississippi has made remarkable improvements in reading scores, while most other states stagnate.
Your job as a policymaker is to uncover the barriers to similar student achievement and address them. Your solutions must be for state or local actors, but your canvas is broad. You can examine staffing, time utilization, discipline, instruction, accountability, curriculum, food insecurity, absenteeism fixes, approaches to reading instruction, teaching roles, classroom disruption and the like. Your solution must go beyond simply adding funding to existing programs, and if your plan requires political consensus — such as state legislation — you must explain how you will build it.