Morgan Polikoff 🏳️🌈
@mpolikoff
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Educational researcher. Professor @USCRossier . Husband of @joelalanhart . Friend of Dorothy.
Los Angeles, CA
Joined June 2008
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Our new report on potentially contentious issues in the curriculum, out today! The largest and most detailed survey ever on these topics. This report covers an array of race-, LGBTQ-, and sex education-related scenarios in schools, going far deeper than any previous study ...
📝The good news: Despite partisan divides on topics like LGBTQ+ inclusion and racial justice in K-12 curricula, Americans overwhelmingly agree on the value of public education.
New study by
@AnnaSaavedra19
of USC Dornsife and
@mpolikoff
of
@USCRossier
⤵️
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"Yes, SAT and ACT scores do strongly correlate with parental income levels. But when colleges take tests off the table, the remaining measures used to assess applicants are even *more* biased."
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Can't be said enough that this is a terrible idea.
Liberal support for four-day school weeks is worrying.
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If you ever wondered what a time capsule from 1974 would look like, here you go:
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There’s lots of overblown crisis talk in education, but this has got to be the biggest crisis I’ve ever seen in the field.
NEW—During the return to in-person instruction, chronic absenteeism in US public schools nearly doubled → an increase of 6.5 million students:
.
The magnitude, breadth & implications of these increases are sobering & merit serious national attention.
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Joel reminds me that in Ferris Bueller the plot hinges on the principal’s threat that Ferris has been absent 9 times, and this would be his tenth. Post-COVID in most states like 30% of kids are absent 18 times or more!
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It's hard to pull the plug on Twitter, but it provides very close to 0 value now. It's perhaps a silly thing to be sad about, but it's hard for me not to look back on what Twitter was, what value it provided to many (including me!) and how rapidly Elon wrecked it, and feel sad.
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You'll never believe what commonly used element in college applications shows large racial/ethnic gaps!
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More evidence that Reading Recovery does not, in fact, recover one's ability to read. // Long-Term Impacts of Reading Recovery through 3rd and 4th Grade: A Regression Discontinuity Study
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“Adults are too focused on culture war issues.”
The issues: whether we exist, whether we have a right to be served by businesses
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So the current arguments from the school reopening crowd seem to be:
1) Insufficient numbers of teachers died, and
2) Parents of color were duped by the government and the media.
Cool everything is great on Twitter.
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Throwing out one imperfect but useful measure while ignoring the same (or greater) imperfections in other measures is par for the course in education. It’s a bad idea.
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On this June 1 (and also on all other days), I think it’s important you know that I’m spectacularly gay and grateful every day for it. And 13 year old closeted Morgan wouldn’t have believed my life could have turned out this way!
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"Forty-six percent!" I yelled to an empty room. // "In Minneapolis Public Schools, for instance, the overall attendance rate fell from 79% to 46% from 2019 to 2022."
@The74
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It’s a fantasy that we strip away testing and accountability and now we’ll finally be able to teach kids how we know they should be taught. The same kids who got screwed before will get screwed again, only now we won’t even know. And there will be a new bogeyman for our failure.
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17 years today since I met
@joelalanhart
for a sushi dinner. His profile picture at the time he slid into my DMs was him drinking a beer out of a dog bowl (The Villager in Nashville gives you one on your birthday). Anyway, prost to the next 17!
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Alternative title--"Until now, the district has left individual schools totally on their own to figure out how to choose and implement curricula. Isn't that wild?" // NYC schools could soon be forced to adopt a mandated reading curriculum, sources say
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I have been rejected from lots of things, most notably every single full-time job I've ever applied for, except the one I currently have. Though since then I did once get a job offer for a job I did not apply for! Anyway all it takes is one and often it's just about fit.
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Twitter meant a lot to me and my career. And I think what I and others accomplished on Twitter actually mattered--it shaped education policy and discourse in this country. And now it's all gone, and for no reason at all.
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I would just like one (1) person endlessly tweeting about Randi Weingarten to grapple with data from 2020-21 about what parents wanted: ; ; ;
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Year 14, day 1. Bigger office, better view, prettier nails, pants just as tight as always. Let’s go.
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Academic Twitter is dead, and that sucks.
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This is a bad idea that will especially harm the most disadvantaged kids. // 4-Day School Weeks Surge in Popularity Among American Adults
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Looking a school report cards state-by-state, and it has to be said: who on *Earth* are these things for, and how can we expect anyone to use them for anything productive?
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High school graduation rates are sharply rising (good!) but achievement is not (bad!)--what's the story? // New numbers show falling standards in American high schools
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If they ever make a biopic about me I think it might be called Annoyed About Everything Everywhere All At Once
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One thing that is very nice to do periodically is to just send people nice notes. Someone did or said something you liked? Someone seems like they're going through a hard time? Doesn't have to be someone you're close to, just send them a quick note; it may make their day.
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I don't think any of the following facts are really disputable, but probably not too many people agree with all of them because of partisanship:
1) School closures were, on average and with the evidence we had at the time, longer than they should have been in most blue places.
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If folks think the SAT is too highly correlated with SES, wait til they hear about … every system and structure in our society and every other measure used in college admissions. Anyway, here's the course I teach on this topic:
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Some news:
@USCRossier
has recruited Jon Fullerton from
@HarvardCEPR
to direct our new USC EdPolicy Hub . I am co-faculty director, working alongside
@AnnaSaavedra19
and Patricia Burch. So excited to launch this center to help improve education in SoCal.
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Now that I am unverified you can never know who is tweeting from this account. Could be Morgan, could be some other cursive-hating, speedo-wearing, Redfin-obsessed technocrat.
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Magnet schools remain a wildly under-researched topic relative to their prevalence. They're *way* under-studied compared to charters, for instance.
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I'm a huge believer in curriculum. It'll be a key point in book 2, as it was in book 1. But the fact is that we have *way* stronger evidence that money matters in education than we do that specific curriculum approaches matter. "Money doesn't matter" is a totally uninformed take.
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Virtual charters are a disaster. Hard to think of a topic in education where the evidence is more unanimous. (And yes, I am aware of the causal inference challenges here.)
New working paper on virtual charter schools led by the impressive Paul Yoo. TL;DR takeaway: Virtual charter students have worse hs grad and col. enrollment rates, ba attainment, employment rates, & earnings than students in traditional public schools.
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Four-day school weeks are bad for kids.
(editor's note: how many more studies need to be done to throw this bad idea on the dustbin of history?)
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"Today’s obsession on the right with private-school choice and seeming obliviousness to whether kids actually learn anything in school is scarcely calculated to win the approbation or support of “all families.”"
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There is a funny little tension I sometimes run up against when working with policy advocacy folks. The short version is something like this:
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And so I think we need to do better about being honest about what policies can accomplish and not being TRUE BELIEVERS, but rather true believers who recognize that policy is iterative and can/must be critiqued when it is not working, so that we can make it better over time.
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How much might we reduce school segregation by redrawing elementary school attendance zones? A decent amount, and it would actually *reduce* students' travel times a bit
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@mattyglesias
Lots of education-related polls do this. We did this for our recent work on controversial topics in the school curriculum! tl;dr, non-parents are more concerned about the school curriculum than parents are.
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There aren't too many papers in education that come out and you know immediately that they will be seminal - papers with methods and findings that will be highly cited and have substantial impact in both research and practice. This is one.
Representation is said to matter, but I didn't see myself in the world around me growing up.
Whom did I see? With whom was I supposed to identify? What about my children? And what about in children's books? What do children see? How to measure it?
(a thread 🧵👇🏾)
1/n
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“NCLB harmed kids/schools” is absolutely one of the biggest pieces of fake news out there, and also as far as I can tell a core belief of something like 90% of education researchers.
@andysaultz
@ImRachelWhite
@washingtonpost
@ashleyjcarey
@Edu_Historian
@NickKristof
@cmtpitts
@rickhess99
I know you didn't write it, but OMG that headline! My read of the academic research on NCLB is that it caused student performance to go UP.
So the "damage" NCLB did to students was higher achievement and higher grad rates?
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I’m naive, so I never realized the depths of the culture of fear in academia until recently. Students fearing faculty, junior faculty fearing senior, folks fearing colleagues at other institutions. Anyway it’s relentless and gross and we can do better.
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"Mothers are substantially more affected by the school year than are fathers. When school is in session, mothers sleep less, spend more time caring for family members and driving them around, and spend less time on eating, free time and exercise."
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"Good lord" I shout to an empty room as I'm playing around with states' school report cards and stumble upon schools with >50% chronic absenteeism.
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Means can be misleading!
The average President/Ex-President has been changed with 2 felonies over the course of U.S. history. 🇺🇸
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With the help of a trainer at
@Equinox
I have progressed from 0 pull-ups (January 1) to four sets of six (today)!
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[does 14 years of careful education policy research, gets zero live television interview requests]
[writes one 500-word throwaway piece about cursive 12 years ago, gets multiple live television interview requests to this very day]
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Two weeks ago we launched our new USC EdPolicy Hub, bringing together researchers and representatives from 8 local education agencies. Excited to be among the directors of this new venture
@USCRossier
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One of my lowest-effort hearty meals for a cool night is something I had in one of my very first meals out in Philly. Super humble, super easy, super delicious.
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Apropos of absolutely nothing but only 65% of Arkansas schoolchildren are white.
Arkansas made history today, setting the education model for the nation.
The failed status quo is dead, and hope is alive for every kid in our state!
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One thing that's wild in the literature in education is just how few studies there are that meet standards for causal conclusions. On the topic of professional learning effects on student reading in MS/HS, just 15 studies in 45 years (!) met standards:
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6) Had other kinds of COVID restrictions been in place and had the messaging been different, more people, but definitely not anywhere close to all people, would have been comfortable with in-person learning in 20-21.
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Uh, this is incredible.
I asked ChatGPT to rewrite the bar scene from Good Will Hunting to focus on the legacy of a Nation at Risk. Amazing results.
@Dyrnwyn
@marcportermagee
@MichaelPetrilli
@RbnLake
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Hooding 15 (!)
@USCRossier
EdD graduates I’ve had the pleasure of shepherding through the dissertation process. Fight on, and all that!
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But doing a policy wrong--or claiming that it will do something that it does not--is fundamentally a bad idea, and I think in the long run undermines faith, not just in the policy itself, but in government as a whole.
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I am framing this tweet.
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It is problematic that one party's ideas on education are pretty minimal. It is problematic that the other party's ideas on education are basically all harmful to both children and the systems themselves. I know which one is more problematic to me; do you?
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What's the impact of COVID on *non-test* academic outcomes for students? Check out the latest report from
@CRPE_edu
, authored by me,
@dans1lver
, &
@isabel_clay
. We review evidence from dozens of studies since March 2020 and provide answers to 3 questions:
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Testifying in one hour! :)
Here's my testimony to the Missouri Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about the teaching of race-related content in the curriculum, in case you're interested!
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I am proud to be a donor to FIRE, and I hope the folks currently protesting on college campuses similarly support this important organization.
UPDATE: In the wake of the shocking events at UT Austin yesterday, FIRE filed public records requests last night with both the university and the Texas Department of Public Safety.
We’re looking into UT Austin’s protest-related comms with state officials. We’ll keep you posted…
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I knew her when! Congrats
@KatharineStrunk
// Katharine O. Strunk named Dean of Penn’s Graduate School of Education
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YES. Though I also think we should not oversell the utility of state tests for making actionable decisions for individuals, since that's not generally what they're mainly intended to do.
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We need more spicy Joe
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Excited to testify next week in front of the Missouri Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about the potential impact of current policy debates about the teaching of race-related content in the curriculum!
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We've entered that magical season where people take a brief hiatus from complaining about AERA to post pictures about how they're enjoying the conference so much before immediately returning to complaining again.
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As a survey methodologist I can comfortably say there are too many damn surveys that are too poorly constructed and I am sick of it.
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Thanks to the
@TeachingLabHQ
for inviting me to come talk about standards, curriculum, and how policy can help improve teaching. And thanks also for selecting this 12-year old headshot of me where I just so happen to be wearing the same blazer I wore today!
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People lecturing me about what the polls said when I literally ran those polls and wrote about them in real time throughout 2020-21. Ain’t twitter the best!
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Has anyone considered writing a song about education policy to the tune of Alanis Morissette's "Ironic"? Because I feel like there's real opportunity with the whole "10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife" line.
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My evergreen observation is that policy research (particularly quantitative policy research) focuses insufficiently on curriculum issues. I think this is largely (but not exclusively) a data issue--curriculum-related data are not as good/widely available as needed for good work.
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You know the times are a-changing when I only get one "I follow you on Twitter" at
#AEFP2024
. Thanks for ruining everything, Elon!
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My feeling is we have 5 or 10 reasons that are each increasing absenteeism by 10-20 percent-ish, and that's how you get to double. Kids are sicker, we keep people home more now when they're sicker, stuff is available online, general change in valuation of schooling, etc...
A lot of people seem to be framing absenteeism in terms of a foundational break in the educational contract but I have yet to see any actual data on this. I’m a mom to 4 chronically absent kids. My attitude about school hasn’t changed. What’s changed is a dramatic ⬆️ in illness
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A tough read. // Teachers Can’t Hold Students Accountable. It’s Making the Job Miserable.
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Ok boys and girls and theys, I’m going to take July off and see how the site looks on August 1 or later. If this is the end, it’s been real.
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Many things can be true. Grade inflation is real, happening at all levels. Test scores are down post-Covid (and were at best stagnant pre-Covid). More kids are graduating high school than ever before. How one weighs increased graduation vs. decreased skills is not obvious.
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Oof these chronic absenteeism numbers from California ...
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New outdoor dining table, to be delivered next week, will have this view. I’m excited. Who’s coming to dinner?
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Turns out if you require uniform, quality curriculum, deliberate implementation of that curriculum, and clear expectations for how teachers are to to use curriculum, school is more coherent and effective. Whodathunkit?
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Enhancing the diversity of school boards in California boosted spending on Hispanic students, as well as the achievement in their schools, and reduced teacher turnover in those schools:
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USC having an event on queer Jeopardy champs and their very own queer Jeopardy champion professor wasn't even invited? Rude!
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Linkedin just cannot work as a replacement for Twitter because it is *so* performatively earnest in a profoundly annoying way.
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There are lots of problems with the Deboer piece on education, but the most obvious one to me is the patently untrue argument that policy doesn't work, that's we've been shoveling money at the problem and outcomes aren't better. That's very, very wrong.
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I guess this is a subtweet of … literally everyone, but schools and districts not spending money in ways that states or the feds (or pointy-headed experts) think they should is a feature of the way our schools are organized, not a bug.
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Lots of work to do, but this is a great development in a city with a history of wildly decentralized curriculum control. // New York Is Forcing Schools to Change How They Teach Children to Read
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My contribution to the USC discourse is that I wore my
@TheFIREorg
"Free Speech Makes Free People" t-shirt to the gym yesterday and I think people thought I was a Republican. Don't worry, I'll wear my "We're All Lesbians" t-shirt tomorrow just to confuse them.
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Excited to start working on chapter 3 in my new book, wherein I plan to solve all of America's educational testing problems in a single, 7000-word hot take. *wipes hands*
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New research out today with
@amystorn
! We investigate five districts working to implement standards using high-quality curriculum materials, identifying shared practices that seem to enable more successful implementation efforts.
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Come hear me say "gay" over and over and over again, Saturday morning at 10 am in Denver!
#AEFP2023
(further cementing the case that "gay" is my defining personality trait)
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There’s lots in here, but one minor point is that I continue to believe it’s a bad idea to try to pretend that state tests should be instructionally useful in the year in which they’re administered. That’s not their purpose. Sets up an obvious anti-test talking point.
I know it seems like Dems have nothing to say about public education at a time when it's under ferocious assault, but that's not true. Here they are reminding us about the fierce urgency of standardized testing
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One thing that has happened recently is that I have become keenly aware of fashion trends (wide pants, long socks) and decided that I will not adopt them and will instead simply accept that I am old and all the youngsters have bad taste.
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Seems to me like the recent evidence about the ineffectiveness of the teacher evaluation movement is another mark against the need for every-kid-every-year state summative testing. I do not expect that policy to survive the next ESEA reauthorization, whenever that is.
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