History of the Center for Policy Design

(1981 - Current)

The Center was founded in 1981 as the Center for Policy Studies when Walt McClure left the Minneapolis-based Interstudy, a health policy think tank , where he had worked under the leadership of Paul Ellwood since 1969.

At the Center McClure developed Large System Architecture, both a general theory of why organizations do what they do and a set of methods to design and carry out system redesign strategies to redirect the system incentives, when necessary, to align with goals society has for the system.

With these methods he and his colleagues at the Center developed a health care system reform strategy to get better care for less, and developed a National Health Insurance proposal consonant with this strategy. McClure assisted Medicare, Pennsylvania and Cleveland to implement the first step of the strategy, severity-adjusted outcomes assessment of providers, before his retirement in 1990 for medical reasons. That work was chronicled by the Wall Street Journal in 2009.

At the time of McClure’s retirement the Center became active in public education system redesign under the leadership of Ted Kolderie, through the project Education|Evolving. Kolderie and his colleagues established themselves as influential thought leaders and actors in American education reform by working with states and national policy makers on the architecture of the K-12 system, and recently have become involved in the redesign of schooling.

Beginning in 2010 the Center became home to the Minnesota Education Policy Fellowship (MNEPF). In 2020 the Center began a partnership with Lakes Country Service Cooperative to offer both a metro and rural Fellowship.   Launched  in 1975 the Fellowship has nearly 550 "EPF" Fellows in the state. Until 2010 the Fellowship had been hosted by the University of Minnesota.

In 2014 the Center changed its name from the Center for Policy Studies to the Center for Policy Design to reflect its focus on development of actionable policy strategy at the system level and fuses policy research, analysis and design with early to mid career policy fellowships."

The Center will be celebrating its 45th Anniversary in October 2026.

—Dan Loritz, Senior Fellow and President