Morgan Polikoff

Morgan Polikoff is a professor of education at USC Rossier. His areas of expertise include K-12 education policy; curriculum, standards, accountability, and assessment policy; survey research methods; and the impact of COVID-19 on American families' educational experiences.

Dr. Polikoff uses quantitative and mixed methods to study the design, implementation, and effects of curriculum, standards, assessment, and accountability policies. In 2021 he published his first book, Beyond Standards: The Fragmentation of Education Governance and the Promise of Curriculum Reform (Harvard Education Press). Recent work has investigated the adoption and use of core and supplemental curriculum materials to align with state standards and the use of surveys to explore voters' education policy preferences. Ongoing work focuses on the influence of curriculum materials on the implementation of standards in the classroom and the impact of COVID-19 on families’ educational experiences. He has been Co-Editor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and Associate Editor of the American Educational Research Journal and is on the editorial boards for Educational Researcher and AERA Open. He has published over 55 peer-reviewed journal articles and received (as PI or co-PI) more than $16 million in grants from federal and foundation sources. For his research achievements he received the AERA Early Career Award in 2017 and the AERA Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award in 2020. For his work with graduate students and postdocs he also received outstanding mentoring awards from USC Rossier and USC in 2018 and 2019, respectively. He chaired the faculty at USC Rossier from 2017 to 2019.

Dr. Polikoff received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education in 2010 with a focus on Education Policy and his Bachelors in Mathematics (minor in Secondary Education) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006. He lives in Northeast LA with his husband, Joel, and their cattle dog, Indy.