This study of policy making is set in Chicago's school system during the late 1960's. The three case studies presented here identify a school board's response to core issues faced by school policy makers in the largest of the central cities in the United States. After applying both bargaining and unitary models to the Chicago school board's policy making processes, it is argued that the relative utility of the models is in part a function of the analyst's purposes. In this study, bargaining models prove crucial for specifying the significance of such matters as the power of the political machine, mayoral influence on board behavior; internal conflicts within the Board of Education; and group pressures of teachers, neighborhood organizations, and city wide school reformers. But the utility of these bargaining models for generalizing big city school politics as a whole is seen to be limited. It is held that what Chicago shared with other once central cities was school system entropy and a relative decline in its socioeconomic status. The study concludes that when looked at in historical perspective, it is all the more clear that the socioeconomic decline of the city, strikingly captured by the rational decision making model, significantly constrained the making of school policy. (Author/JM)