Chief School Business Official Specialization

Managing and Leading Effective Organizations

This course is designed to provide students with the skills and knowledge to facilitate innovative leadership and management within different types of organizations.  This course focuses on the impact of leadership and management on organizational effectiveness. Students will hone their critical thinking and problem solving skills. Students will learn attributes of successful leaders and managers, the challenges they face in in a global society, and how they build relationships and impact culture for organizational sustainability and innovations. 

Ethics, Law & Communication in Decision Making

This course introduces the legal and ethical obligations in business. Knowledge of law and ethics must be included into managerial decisions.  Students will learn to apply and communicate ethical frameworks to business decisions, with a lens on social responsibility. Proactive and effective communication can provide a competitive edge to organizations, reducing risk and liability.

Global Marketing in the Digital Era

This course is designed to provide students with the knowledge and understanding of the global marketing environment through key marketing concepts, digital marketing tools and global marketing strategy.  The course challenges you to think critically about the global marketplace.  Students will hone their approach to global marketing decisions, policies and strategies.  Students will learn to formulate and evaluate a global marketing plan through the use of digital marketing tools and techniques.  

Organizational Behavior

This course focuses on providing students with cutting edge thinking about the topics that are germane to organizational behavior.  It is the people within an organization who create, innovate, and are responsible for keeping a competitive advantage. Knowing how to motivate and mobilize an organization’s human capital is critical to organizational performance. This course will assist students in developing a systematic understanding of why people behave the way they do and understand how to translate that knowledge into organizational applications.

Economics for Management

This course examines key economic concepts critical to managerial decision-making within today’s business environment with an emphasis on national and global, real-world applications.  The course incorporates both microeconomic and macroeconomic principles.

Entrepreneurialism & Innovation

This course challenges students to think about how they can create, build, or change an organization through sound leadership and management theories, personal relationships, creative and critical thinking, as well as how design thinking and innovation principles can be used to create value.

School Funding Accounting & Budgeting

This required course in the Chief School Business Official’s Endorsement program supports the development of servant-leaders in public schools. Integrity and competence are demonstrated as candidates show their understanding of the basic concepts and best practices related to school fund accounting and budgeting.

Managing Human Capital (HR, HCM, Global Teams)

Organizational managers and leaders must understand how changing technologies, demographics, mergers and acquisitions, and globalization influence the potential of human capital to create and maintain strategic competitive advantage.  This course will focus on how expanding the leadership and talent pool by having a sound diversity strategy can create competitive advantage.  Issues such as immigration, diversity laws, work-life balance, equal opportunity, ageism, and the multigenerational workforce are discussed.

School District Financial Planning and Analytics

This course is an eight-week clinical experience at the K12 level on the role of the chief school business official in overseeing and allocating financial, human resource and other resources to promote student performance.

Principles of School Business Management

Introduces students to the role of school business management including key concepts, skills and aptitudes. Provides a basis from which students can connect and apply key school business management concepts to their graduate business education in the MBA program.

Global Management

This course focuses on how globalization has opened the world to organizations and provides students the skills and knowledge to perform effectively as a leader within a company with global presence. Topics covered the broader themes about globalization and its implications, as well as multinational business strategies, from exporting to foreign direct investment, as well as economic, political, and cultural influences on the international marketplace.

School Finance Law

This course examines the legal framework for school finance law.  Case law will be examined and applied to legal problems that confront chief school business officials. Students will explore the affect of school finance legal decisions on protected classes such as low income, special education and ELL students.  Lastly, the course will explore the affect of school finance legal decisions on student achievement.

School Business Management Internship I & II

Academic, 16-week, semester long clinical experiences at the K12 level, requiring extensive, intensive and diverse assignments including school business management policies required for Illinois CSBO Licensure.  Prerequisite:  Department approval.

Seminar in Higher Education (EDU 6015)

In addition to the base program curriculum, international students attending face-to-face classes on the CUC campus are required to take the Seminar in Higher Education, a 3-credit course. This requirement will not apply to international DBA students studying exclusively online.