Vladimir Kogan
@vkoganpolisci
Followers
3K
Following
9K
Media
188
Statuses
4K
Professor at @osupolisci, education policy gadfly (tweets represent my opinions only)
Joined November 2017
Three years ago, I filed public records request with CA DOJ for some basic arrest and disposition data (previously easily downloadable on their website) for research. @AGRobBonta promised a response by Dec. 27, 2021. Still waiting. Every e-mail and phone call goes unanswered.
1
3
15
Although achievement is down across the board, it is WAY down for lowest achieving students. In reading, the NAEP scores for bottom quartile are the worst *ever recorded* (among 13-year-olds). For anyone worried about equity, this should be a national emergency.
24
96
421
@JohnDSailer Just listened, I didn't hear any smoking gun. To be clear, I *know* it is totally plausible and the Reign of Terror he describes is real. But, "I thought the visit went great!" is not really compelling evidence this was pivotal to hiring decision.
2
0
130
@karenvaites @sfchronicle @jilltucker Curious: Was the district spokesperson who lied about the district being off the state achievement watchlist also placed on leave?.
2
15
140
@JohnDSailer I agree, shocking! How do we know that "he was almost certainly going to receive" the offer?.
1
0
117
These numbers come two years after schools reopened. After two summers of summer school, two years of "high-dosage tutoring," etc. After billions and billions in federal COVID aid spent. Clearly, what we have done so far is not working.
3
16
122
Worst of all, there is no plan to do anything about this. Adults seem more interested in fighting with each other about what books are in the school library than addressing the fact that kids can't read (and one-third say they don't read).
4
16
111
A year ago, I warned high school students were not recovering. Now it's too late. "Recent high school graduates and those who will graduate over the next several years are almost certain to be the least prepared to enter the labor market or college in several generations.".
4
9
103
Students cannot catch up if they are not in school, and attendance is abysmal. We need to stop making excuses. It's not just kids out with COVID. Not just 10-day quarantines. We need carrots and stick to address attendance ASAP.
5
9
101
Important piece! People mock DeSantis, but then give a pass when former White House COVID coordinator literally makes stuff up.
NYT Publishes Falsehood by Former Biden Covid Coordinator About UK Vaccine Policy. A blatantly untrue statement by a former White House official disparages a foreign government, and adds to an article's misleading context about US policy. Read more here:.
3
13
90
Imagine doing this for any other public service: "We have a police officer recruitment and burnout crisis. It will be 'self-defense Fridays' from now on so police officers can get a well deserved break.".
12
18
83
The big problem with having "lived experience" inform policy is that ignores everything we've learned from generation of research on cognitive science. Memory is highly fallible, perception is distorted by all sorts of biases and shortcuts (Tversky and Kahneman, anyone?), etc.
"But “lived experience” in child welfare has been solicited and disseminated in ways that distort the conversation and promote policies that ignore data and evidence." .
5
9
71
Reviewing book on schools and pandemic and am reminded how much Covid shook our faith in expertise. I recall many academic experts I hold in high regard arguing getting virus under control was necessary to restart economy, schools needed tons $$ to reopen, etc. All were wrong.
2
4
76
Excellent piece!. Prediction: In 100 years, people will look back at modern anti-Asian discrimination in college admissions and shake their head the same way we look back at anti-Jewish discrimination today.
Wrote about the end of affirmative action and the very weird but expected fact that nobody’s really talking about the Asian plaintiffs or the extremely obvious discrimination they faced
6
1
75
University professors really need to think through the consequences of having higher ed institutions become perceived as completely out of touch with half of the country -- and the blame they deserve for having made it so. This will not work out well in the long run.
9
19
72
And note: Non-parents are the median voter in local school board elections. So looking at school board election results and claiming, "parents have spoken!" is wrong. It's actually "a bunch of old people without kids have spoken!".
NEW: The conventional wisdom is that parents have grown increasingly furious with public schools. But it's actually people without school-age children who are particularly skeptical of public schools, multiple surveys show.
7
18
59
Unintended (but predictable) consequences in 3 acts:. Act 1: "Standardized tests are racist! HS GPA are better predictors of college performance!". Act 2: Drop ACT/SAT, use only GPA for college admission. ACT 3: High school teachers give everyone As. (Would be mean not to!)
6
12
58
Excited that my paper on the role of teachers' union endorsements in school board elections with @MichaelTHartney is now out in @AJPS_Editor!.
5
16
57
Bloomberg is right (as usual):. "This is a five-alarm fire, but most elected officials aren’t responding or even discussing it. There is no plan from Washington, no joint session of Congress, no Oval Office address. What’s a presidential bully pulpit for, if not this?".
2
7
52
Please go back and watch Feinstein's performance in her Senate campaign debate five years ago. Then compare to (1) her near-comatose state in office a few years later and (2) Biden at this week's debate.
Democratic elites seem to have completely memory holed the Diane Feinstein debacle -- years of stories filled with anonymous anecdotes of cognitive decline, but aides insisting she was sharp as a tack.
0
5
50
Older kids are in trouble, and our interventions are not at all calibrated or targeted to actually reach them (or kids who need help the most, more generally).
4
12
43
It's odd that university leaders can't just say, "Your points about hypocrisy and double standards are well taken. With the benefit of hindsight, we agree some of earlier statements/actions were inappropriate. We'll try to do better." Seems like it would diffuse all of the drama.
5
2
45
UC Berkely's "diversity statement rubric" -- which includes points for subscribing to in-vogue but heavily disputed ideas -- is probably one of the worst, most politically tone deaf development that undercut sincere DEI efforts since 2020. Hard to believe people still defend it.
In the NYT, @powellAtlantic notes that UC Berkeley carried out a cluster hire—eliminating 75% of faculty job applicants based on DEI statement alone. The second photo is Berkeley's own description. Universities around the U.S. have embraced this model. A quick thread.
2
9
41
Reminder: According to all of the surveys and conjoint experiments, the one thing teachers value even more than money is principal support with bad student behaviors.
I comment on the rise of the 4-day school week as a strategy to recruit and retain teachers, especially in rural districts. There’s a better approach: Pay them better.
1
10
45
@karenvaites @chicagosmayor @rweingarten Recall one of the Chicago teachers unions demands as a precondition for school reopening was . more affordable housing in Chicago.
4
4
43
Very excited to be part of the effort to help build the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State!.
10
1
40
This is outrageous! When DeSantis did this with UF professors testifying against state election laws, people were up in arms. Now Thurmond (2026 Dem gub. candidate) is doing it in California, involving litigation over pandemi clearning loss, and it's total silence.
This is remarkable story: California moves to silence Stanford researchers (@seanfreardon & @ProfTDee) who got state data to study education issues via @edsource.
6
6
36
Very excited to share new paper with @MichaelTHartney on teachers' union influence in local school board elections!. Read on for details!.
2
8
34
It has made me realize how much confirmation bias there is, even among subject-level experts, and how hard it is to separate personal beliefs and agendas from research. Researchers with PhDs are just humans after all, it turns out.
3
3
35
@davidzweig Great work dude! Surprised no one bothered to cross-check grant numbers and publications. 🤯.
1
1
35
@DrJBhattacharya @AlecMacGillis I would add: Many educational professionals don't seem at all concerned about making up the learning disruptions. There is an entire "learning loss is not real"/"test scores don't matter" contingent highly concentrated in that community. Remember this?.
3
2
34
Democratic elites seem to have completely memory holed the Diane Feinstein debacle -- years of stories filled with anonymous anecdotes of cognitive decline, but aides insisting she was sharp as a tack.
5
6
32
Wow, my colleague Stephane Lavertu wrote a devastating expert report demolishing every empirical claim made in the Ohio voucher funding lawsuit!. (Also demolishing Josh Cowen's report for other side!).
5
17
30
"University experienced significant grade inflation during pandemic, which exceeded the estimated effects of any COVID-19 diagnoses. Elevated grades continued even when classes returned to F2F instruction suggesting an acceleration of grade inflation".
2
12
28
This is so bad and so wrong. Quite literally the heckler's veto.
1
2
28
Political scientists: @APSAtweets must cancel conference in solidarity with striking hotel workers who demand living wage!. Meanwhile at @MPSAnet: We're hiring senior editorial assistant. Same pay as striking LA housekeepers ($20/hr). But part time, no benefits, PhD required. 🤔
1
2
23
Back in the day, they used to call this the "soft bigotry of low expectations.". "requiring all students to pass tests or create an in-depth assignment . was a harmful hurdle for historically marginalized students".
1
1
24
@alexanderrusso @anndosshelms @LauraPappano Have to say, the narrative of "far-right extremism is driving parent activism" hasn't aged well.
1
8
23
After teaching a class on the politics of election law and administration, I finally served as an election worker at today's Ohio statewide special election. Fascinating experience!.
1
0
23
Are school boards democratic? Check out video. I discuss four metrics: participation, election competitiveness, whether incumbents are held accountable for performance, and responsiveness. Bottom line: Not good. And I discuss three potential reforms.
1
9
23
Student surveys are all the rage in ed policy -- for measuring non-test score value-added, SEL, growth mindset, ideological indoctrination, etc. Folks need to think through incentives. We worry about "teaching to test," what about "teaching to survey?".
3
5
21
No one has articulated a coherent theory for: (1) delaying algebra by a year, because disadvantaged students are unprepared; (2) but then cramming geometry into six weeks. How can students who couldn't do algebra in 8th grade do geometry in six weeks?.
2
1
20
Wow, this is one of the most brilliant ideas for addressing partisan gerrymandering I have seen. Absolute must-read!!!.
3
3
20
@alexanderrusso @anya1anya The "Shut up, you took Koch money" response is no better than "shut up, you're in the pocket of teachers unions.". Guilt by association is the most lazy and intellectually dishonest form of argument. Instead of arguing on the merits.
1
0
21
Several years ago, two students got me a cat bowtie as a gift that I promised to wear to class on the first day of the semester. I continued the tradition today, in memory of my wonderful cat Tori!
0
0
19
Academia badly needs a 9/11 commission-style effort to seriously examine the consequences of growing groupthink, ideologically motivated reasoning, and replacement of commitment to science -- including intellectual humility and uncertainty -- with true-believer evangelism.
Academia is on the verge of having most of America turn against it and my progressive colleagues are in such a bubble they are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic not realizing that Claudine Gay is the canary in the coal mine. If we do not seriously reform, we will lose.
2
1
19
I've spoken w/ several journalists in recent weeks who were all surprised to hear that current CRT/LGBT book debates are just a repeat of history. Well-meaning adult activists ALWAYS want schools to inculcate their political agendas and values. And freak out when others do too.
1
4
18
Shocking, spineless behavior. And they say cancel culture isn't real. .
The ACCP Board of Regents has provided an update regarding the choice for the 2023 ACCP Annual Meeting Keynote Address. Please read the update here:
2
0
19
This story should be getting a lot more attention. Instead, California journalists just want to write about Newsom talking trash about DeSantis and Superintendent Thurmond intentionally getting himself thrown out of local school board meetings. Sad.
1
10
17
Failure of ESSER was predictable. Give districts unrestricted $10s billions and they will (1) increase hiring (worsening shortages in hard-to-staff schools); (2) increase pay (setting up fiscal cliff in future); and (3) sign up for latest hyped-up, unproven snake oil programs.
Yikes, not sure how prevalent this is with online tutoring, but findings like these help explain why we aren't seeing large benefits associated w/ this type of tutoring. Juggling kids, Googling for answers: Online tutors say Paper often fails students
3
2
18
Insane how often true-believers claim RCTs/ clinical trials are unethical based on horrible evidence, not worried about the ethics of prescribing interventions that (1) may not work and (2) may even make things worse. Docs used to make similar argument about bleeding patients. .
What is even more frustrating about this case is that the authors say an RCT would be unethical in this context because there's so much other evidence that in-prison college programs reduce recidivism. 🤯. (1) That is not true. All studies on this topic use the same flawed design.
1
4
16
Lots of good ideas in this thread.
If you are a university donor, this is a key moment. You're seeing the bad fruit of 2 related things:.1. Years of faculty searches that have been explicitly ideological & partisan, prizing & hiring for the illiberal radicalism on display in the Kendi debacle & Hamas-praise alike.
0
3
18
Never thought I'd see my name printed in the daily journal of the Ohio Senate!
0
0
15
Interesting that we now have a second state (Georgia) with rigorous RCT evidence on pre-K, fining that effects fade out and eventually turn negative! Tenn. isn't a fluke after all. Should give pause to folks who believe early childhood ed is cure-all.
5
10
17
@alexanderrusso If there is a shortage of teachers, not obvious to me how anyone thinks there could possibly be a way to staff up "high-intensity tutors" at scale either. Seems total wishful thinking.
8
2
17
If Dems were really worried about youth vote, you'd think getting FAFSA to work would be at least as high priority as calling for elections in Israel and freezing LNG exports.
If folks who pretend to care about college affordability and low-income college students put a fraction of effort into the FAFSA fiasco as they do into the performative loan forgiveness BS. @arotherham.
2
9
17
The revisionism about Chicago school closures a decade ago is getting insane. No, moving schools didn't hurt student achievement. No, closures didn't cause neighborhoods to decline. Yes, the consolidations did save the district hundreds of millions $$.
1
6
17
Very odd that the "crackdown" is what is triggering "alarm" -- rather than the excessive absences that hurt students.
HISD’s crackdown on 'excessive' teacher absences triggers alarm, confusion among staff
0
2
16
Love this paper (and similar one by poliscis)! . Good reminder that "more democracy" and "local control" are not unalloyed goods. People accept this now in housing policy, but not folks who write papers/books on education (e.g., state takeovers, etc.).
1
1
17
Good news, but shocking there is still no coverage of this in major California publications.
.@CADeptEd backs down, drops ban on researchers . from testifying against it in order to get access to ed data; win for @ProfTDee & all ed researchers @PublicCounsel @MoFoLLP @ACLU_SoCal
1
4
16
Science denial and climate change denial are all (rightly) fringe position, but oddly learning loss denial remains mainstream in some quarters.
WATCH: A Virginia state board member wanted to strike a line from the state’s annual report that said learning loss was most severe among kids whose schools were closed longest. She asserted that the evidence for this was “inconclusive at best.” @arotherham was having none of it.
2
2
16
Very odd that "civil rights" groups seems more concerned about racial disparities in school closure but not the racial disparities in teacher/school quality and teacher experience level during the many years/decades those schools were open.
2
2
16
I have no doubt everyone was entirely well-meaning, but road to hell is paved with good intentions. Impossible to read some of these and not see DEI statements being used as ideological litmus tests. Proud that @AFA_Alliance raised these issues long before it was fashionable.
At OSU, many faculty searches made DEI an explicit criterion in their evaluations—often on par with teaching and research. In a search in astrophysics, “the DEI statement was given equal weight to the research and teaching statements.”. Similar for biological anthropology.
0
2
16
@gabrielmbross @CSElmendorf I think folks need to come to terms with the reality that new construction affordable housing is an oxymoron. Most affordable housing is older housing stock that becomes affordable via filtering as new (expensive) housing comes online. That will be true regardless of subsidies.
3
1
13
@mpolikoff Wait, you're saying not everyone can go build houses in Mexico or find a way to fluff up their diversity statement by organizing a mentorship program for underrepresented youth?! Shocking!.
0
0
13
If folks who pretend to care about college affordability and low-income college students put a fraction of effort into the FAFSA fiasco as they do into the performative loan forgiveness BS. @arotherham.
3
4
15
If this was, e.g., a SC teacher out on leave for complaining about students not being able to read Ta-Nehisi Coates in violation of CRT ban -- rather than CA teacher complaining about "Woke Kindergarten" -- it would be top story in, e.g., @washingtonpost.
The East Bay teacher said district officials summoned him to a video conference Thursday afternoon, where they instructed him to turn in his keys and laptop and not return to his classroom at Glassbrook Elementary until further notice.
0
3
16
5 yrs ago, our math dept claimed students who transfer in/pass AP for calculus do worse in subsequent courses vs. those who took it at OSU (but would not share data). Now AP is arguing the opposite to justify lower scores for passage. Both can't be right.
3
3
15
This is a real issue, and university bureaucrats who see their job as preventing universities from being sued -- even if they know what they are doing is not in the students' long term interest (mental health or overall success and happiness) are to blame.
“In 2016 a remarkable one-fifth of the undergraduate population in the United States was determined by their college to have a disability… a 292% increase in students with disabilities at the top eight liberal arts colleges over the past 12 years.”
2
0
15
You can start by actually focusing on recovery from pandemic learning loss, which disproportionately impacted students of color.
Diversity matters. It strengthens equal opportunity and improves student outcomes. It enhances the college experience for everyone. The Supreme Court decision will not stop us from fighting for students of color.
0
0
15
@CarisaCollins Because those enrollments won't disappear but instead just be absorbed by another department that has an even better cost-revenue ratio? Students still have to take courses to satisfy GE and credit requirements. .
8
0
12
@anya1anya @alexanderrusso You could make that argument about literally any group. E.g., teachers unions advocate that schools exist to employ adults, not serve kids. Just because you find that argument more ideologically convenient doesn't make the guilt by association any less intellectually lazy.
2
1
15
Conventional wisdom is that school closures are bad for students, but evidence does not show this. Latest research out of Denver, on their portfolio reforms, finds huge positive effects for students whose low-performing schools close. @MichaelPetrilli .
2
7
14
And another important, closely related paper:.
Great piece on my research with @MichaelTHartney!.
0
7
14
Excellent and very fair piece! What makes academia special is a deep and passionate commitment to skepticism and willingness to poke holes in everything. Bad things happen when researchers become true believers and advocates and start drinking their own kool-aid.
"The citation controversy reflects bigger issues with the state of education research. It’s often not as precise as the hard sciences or even social sciences like economics. Academic experts are prone to make wide, sweeping statements . "
1
5
14
Main prob with university DEI efforts is that extreme true-believers self-select into these admin roles. Convincing them to acknowledge legit criticisms is like trying to convince believers in blood letting and virgin sacrifice that those may not be effective medical treatments.
Tabbye Chavous, Chief Diversity Officer at UMich, has penned a long response to the NYT piece on her DEI bureaucracy. Chavous says the article reminded her of “the novice student writing a class paper,” makes accusations of sexism, and then ties the piece to Project 2025. 🧵
0
0
14