About

Morgan Polikoff is a professor of education at USC Rossier School of Education and serves as co-faculty director of the USC EdPolicy Hub. His research focuses on K-12 education policy, including curriculum, standards, accountability, and assessment policies. He employs quantitative and mixed methods to study the design, implementation, and effects of these policies, with particular attention to the impact of COVID-19 on American families' educational experiences. Polikoff has published extensively on topics such as curriculum alignment, education governance, and public opinion on education issues. He authored the book 'Beyond Standards: The Fragmentation of Education Governance and the Promise of Curriculum Reform' in 2021. His work also investigates the adoption and use of curriculum materials, the evaluation processes of mathematics textbooks, and the effects of educational policies during the pandemic. Polikoff has received numerous awards for his research, mentoring, and teaching, including the AERA Early Career Award and the AERA Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award. He holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Research topics

• Mathematics education
• Psychology
• Computer science
• Political science
• Pedagogy

Selected publications

• Test-Based Accountability in K–12 Education

  Educational Measurement · 2026-02-19

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter reviews historical developments, conceptual principles, and empirical evidence for test-based accountability in U.S. K-12 educational systems. The authors present a framework that addresses five key questions: who is holding whom accountable, by what mechanism, using which scores, for what purpose, and with what unintended consequences. This framework enables contrasts among state and federal test-based accountability systems, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and accountability systems with stakes for individual students, teachers, and members of special populations. The authors also review theories of public accountability, reciprocal accountability, alignment, and inflation, as well as the challenges of derived accountability scores and growth models. Additionally, they examine principles for validating test-based accountability systems and discuss the difficulties in predicting trends in this field. This review of current evidence and theory provides a foundation for understanding the complexities of test-based accountability policies and improving future policy design and analysis.

  PublisherDOI

• Elementary Activity Interest Measure

  PsycTESTS Dataset · 2025-01-01

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Relationship of School Modality With Stress and Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Variation Across Sociodemographic Groups

  AERA Open · 2025-07-01

  articleOpen access

  The COVID-19 pandemic and school closures adversely affected adolescents’ mental health and well-being, with the weight of evidence indicating worse outcomes for students attending school remotely or in a hybrid modality compared to fully in person. We leverage survey data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development SM Study (ABCD Study ® ) collected from 6,245 adolescents (mean age = 13.2) during the 2020–2021 school year to investigate the moderating effects of race/ethnicity, household income, and neighborhood disadvantage on the relationship between 2020–2021 school modality and outcomes including perceived stress, sadness, and positive affect. For relatively advantaged students, our results corroborate prior findings that students in remote or hybrid schooling report worse mental health outcomes than students who attended fully in person. However, this pattern between schooling modality and mental health disappears or reverses for relatively disadvantaged students. Given substantial within-group variation, these findings underscore the importance of considering varied student needs in developing mental health supports.

  PublisherDOI

• Who wants to say ‘Gay?’ Public opinion about LGBT issues in the curriculum

  International journal of LGBTQ+ youth studies. · 2024-02-12 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Public schools are currently a source of major political conflict, specifically with regard to topics related to LGBT representation in the curriculum. We report on a large nationally representative survey of American households focusing on their views on what LGBT topics are and should be taught, and what LGBT-themed books should be assigned and available. We report results overall and broken down by demographic, partisan, and geographic variables. We find that Americans report that they largely do not know what topics are being taught in schools, but they do not think LGBT topics are being taught to elementary children. There is widespread opposition to teaching about LGBT topics in elementary school, with more mixed support in high school. Voters are much more opposed to LGBT-themed books being assigned to students than simply made available to them (e.g. in libraries). There are very large splits in attitudes toward LGBT topics in schools, especially along political and religious lines and across states and counties based on partisan lean. We discuss implications of these findings for education policy and urge greater understanding of Americans' views about 'controversial' topics in the curriculum.

  PublisherDOI

• <b>Changes that stick</b>

  Phi Delta Kappan · 2024-03-01 · 1 citations

  article

  Many education leaders may wonder how to implement sustainable policy changes that will benefit youth, families, and the community. Arielle Lentz, Laura Desimone, Amy Stornaiuolo, Katie Pak, Nelson Flores, Philip Nichols, Morgan Polikoff, and Andy Porter share findings from school change efforts in more than 170 districts in five states. They present six key strategies based on this work, and they share examples of how districts employed the success factors of specificity, consistency, power, and stability to help build authority, which in turn led to successful implementation of new policies, curriculums, and professional learnings.

  PublisherDOI

• Bridging America’s Homework Gap by Closing the Digital Divide

  2024-12-05 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract The pandemic revealed how essential access to high-speed Internet was and the unevenness of access to it. This places children in homes on the wrong side of the digital divide at a severe disadvantage as digital access is key to effective learning because of increased use of online learning management systems, multimedia resources, online research as well as for remote schooling during climate and other emergencies. A disproportionate share of the burden resulting from this phenomenon is felt by children of color in urban areas. A long-term solution to closing the digital divide is needed. This chapter explains the scale of the problem and offers a set of recommendations to close the divide.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Struggle to Implement Balanced Assessment Systems: Explanations and Opportunities

  2024-01-01

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Students with mental health struggles linked to absenteeism and lower grades, showing clear need for more in-school support

  2024-08-15

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• When paywall goes AWOL : The demand for open-access education research

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access

  As universities cut library funding and forego expensive journal subscriptions, many academic organizations and researchers, including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), are moving toward open-access publications that are freely downloadable by anyone with a working internet connection. However, the impact of paywalls on the consumption of academic articles is unclear. We provide novel evidence on this question by exploiting a natural experiment in which six high-impact, usually gated AERA journals became open access for a 2-month period in 2017. Using monthly download data and an always-open-access journal as a comparison group, we show that making journals open access likely increased article downloads in those journals by 55% to 95% per month. Given a per-article download price of $36, this suggests a relatively elastic response: The average price elasticity of demand for downloads is 1.2, with individual journal elasticities ranging from 0.6 to 2.

  PublisherDOI

• State Curriculum Reforms and Their Potential Contribution to Instructional System Coherence: A Case Study of Rhode Island and Tennessee

  RAND Corporation eBooks · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  bookOpen access

  RAND researchers draw on quantitative and qualitative data to investigate how English language arts (ELA) curriculum reforms in Rhode Island and Tennessee might be related to the adoption and use of standards-aligned curriculum materials and teachers’ perceptions of instructional system coherence. The researchers also explore relationships between teachers’ perceptions of coherence, schoolwide conditions, and teachers’ ELA instruction.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• An Online System for the Collection of Textbook Adoption Data

  NSF · $300k · 2014–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Andrew C. Porter

  University of Rochester

  28 shared

• Laura M. Desimone

  11 shared

• Daniel Silver

  11 shared

• Julie A. Marsh

  Southern California University for Professional Studies

  10 shared

• Hovanes Gasparian

  10 shared

• Shira Korn

  University of Southern California

  10 shared

• Martin Gamboa

  University of Southern California

  8 shared

• Corey Savage

  American Institutes for Research

  8 shared

Labs

• USC Rossier School of EducationPI

Awards & honors

• AERA Early Career Award (2017)
• AERA Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research…
• Educational Researcher Outstanding Reviewer (2015, 2025)
• USC General Education Teaching Award (2025)
• USC Mentoring Award for faculty mentoring graduate students…