Beyond Standards: The Fragmentation of Education Governance and the Promise of Curriculum Reform

Beyond Standards highlights the structural conditions that have undermined the success of the standards movement and challenges us to confront them. The book offers an impassioned argument about the ways that our decentralized educational systems undermine the pursuit of educational equity and excellence.

Morgan Polikoff applies a wide array of quantitative and qualitative data to provide a pointed critique of the US educational system. He addresses why standards have failed, whether standards-based reform can be salvaged, and what we can do to improve teaching and learning at scale across America’s thirteen thousand school districts.

Polikoff argues that no amount of tinkering can fix standards. Rather, we need to tackle the big, structural issues, such as decentralization. The author identifies curriculum reform as a high-leverage strategy for making meaningful progress at scale and emphasizes that states need to play a greater role in evaluating and recommending high-quality curriculum materials.

Beyond Standards proposes a new, progressive vision that emphasizes the central role of states in challenging the antiquated, segregating structures that have thwarted educational improvement.

Morgan Polikoff, PhD, is an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California (USC) Rossier School of Education. He received his doctorate in education policy from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and his bachelor’s in mathematics with a minor in secondary education in 2006. He has published more than forty peer-reviewed journal articles, with his research primarily focusing on the design, implementation, and effects of standards, curriculum, assessment, and accountability policies in American education. To investigate these issues, he has also been principal investigator or co–principal investigator on grants totaling more than $15 million. In 2017, for his work on these topics, he received the Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). A committed public scholar, he also received the AERA Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award in 2020. He has been an associate editor of the American Educational Research Journal and a coeditor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. He has also been awarded by both USC Rossier and USC for his mentoring of PhD students. A three-time trivia game show champion, Morgan lives in Los Angeles with his husband, Joel Hart, and their cattle dog mutt, Indy.