This year’s challenge prompt focuses on education policy in the post-pandemic era. Your job as a policymaker is to uncover barriers to student success and propose a policy solution to 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. Click here to read the Challenge Guide, including the prompt!

Finalists present to a panel of judges who will select a winner during a live event. The winning team will receive a cash prize as well as support to attend the 2027 Policy Super Bowl at the University of Chicago!