The Education Show

If you hadn’t seen or heard much of USC education professor Morgan Polikoff lately, you’re not alone. He’s off Twitter (for now) and on sabbatical. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have anything to say, and a recent Kelsey Piper rant in The Argument about the lamentable state of education research generated a sharp rebuke from Polikoff: Ill-Informed Essays About Education Research are Weak and Sloppy. Why?In this new interview, Polikoff says that ed research has improved substantially over the past two decades and suggests that slamming qualitative research is a lazy response.“Education isn’t like giving people a pill,” says Polikoff. “If people don’t implement it, then it doesn’t matter.”He doesn’t argue that there isn’t bad research out there — some of it quite popular — or that some percentage of education research isn’t ideologically committed. He just doesn’t think it’s so bad as some of us may think. He also reveals what he’s working on (a second book hopefully coming out in 2027), describes what it’s like to be among the least politically liberal members of the USC education faculty (occasionally fraught), and explains why he hasn’t returned to Twitter yet (he deleted his account and would have to start from scratch). Watch the interview or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple.Previously from The Grade Literacy, blue-state politics, & media reluctance (Kelsey Piper 2025)Why most education reporters are sticking with Twitter — for nowLatest NYT School Data Visualization Dumbs Down Test Results (Sean Reynolds 2017) States and districts fight back, the rise of citizen journalists, & cellphone ban research Get full access to Alexander Russo's The Grade at alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe

With a dozen years on the beat under his belt, Cory Turner is one of the most experienced national education reporters out there, and in this new interview he’s generous enough to share his thoughts about covering two important education stories: the Biden-era student debt relief effort and the present-day explosion of school choice. His most recent major piece is a deep dive into school choice in Iowa, including a universal $8,000 per child allocation that doesn’t necessarily go straight from the public school system to private school but still creates a potentially enormous financial burden for the state. “It’s not necessarily hurting the public schools” in direct financial terms, says Turner about what he found in Iowa. “But it is essentially putting the state and its general fund on the hook for a new stream of funding.”Asked about his coverage of the Biden-era student debt relief effort, Turner reminds us that the effort’s questionable legality and usefulness were known and reported from the start — by him, at least — and that the Biden effort shouldn’t be confused with pre-existing Congressionally-approved loan forgiveness and income-contingent repayment programs that had preceded debt relief. Watch the interview or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple.While I neglected to ask him whether the questionable politics of debt relief — now much-discussed among Democratic pundits — were also known and reported at the time, Turner has lots of interesting things to say about journalistic fairness, bringing context into coverage, and the importance of focusing on what seems most important rather than what might generate the most interest in a given moment. “I think one of the things that still I still grapple with is holding multiple truths in my hands at once — and helping listeners and readers do the same,” says Turner. “I do get a little tired of the overly politicized rhetoric today where borrowers who were hurt don’t even want to talk publicly anymore because the public’s like, ‘boo hoo.’ It can be true that the system sucked and someone got hurt and it’s set them back and also that you you didn’t go to college and you didn’t feel like you could borrow this money. It’s both true.”As for the federal school choice law, “there’s not one way to do it. There are actually more and less thoughtful ways of rolling out, let’s say a private school voucher or an education savings account program.” Previously from The GradeTough jobs: covering private school choice in 2026 (EdWeek’s Matt Stone) Full-time reporting on school choice (Josh Snyder of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette) ‘We are the media now,’ says school choice advocate Corey DeAngelisInside the Harper’s magazine story about teaching at an ESA-funded micro-school (Chandler Fritz) The Democratic case for private school choice (DFER head Jorge Elorza)‘We could have been a lot louder,’ says NPR’s Anya Kamenetz Claudio Sanchez looks back: Lessons from 30 years covering education for NPR (2019) Get full access to Alexander Russo's The Grade at alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe