I'm back in plenary session, virtual edition. I'm joined by Dr. Vlad Kogan. Professor Kogan is an associate professor of political science at the Ohio State University. He's a returning guest to this show. He's been here before, I think, in 2020. Vlad, it's great to see you again.

Hey, it's great to be back. It's been a few years, has it been, since you've been on the show at least? It has, and it's funny that we're still talking about the same stuff we talked about back then.

That's true.

We haven't made a lot of progress on some of these issues.

Well, we have, but we'll talk about where we are.

So your focus, of course, is educational policy, and even more broadly than that, or maybe more specifically than that,

it's the interface of politics and education. Do you mind reminding listeners, what is it you

study, Vlad Kogan? Yeah, for sure. So we're interested at, it's me and a group of people,

we're interested in thinking about how schools are governed. In the United States, we have primarily

local control. So we have thousands

of local school boards that elect tens of thousands of local school board members to make these

key policies. And so a lot of our work has been thinking about that interface and thinking about

how the decisions that voters make on Election Day affect student learning in the classroom. But since

last talk, we kind of expanded that a little bit.

So it last, you know, two years, we've actually been working with the Ohio Department of Education and helping them analyze the state assessment data to really get a handle on how

COVID has impacted student learning in our state and also, you know, to track the recovery and

think about what's working and what's not working. So at the time we talked, it was all theoretical, but now we actually have, I think, some concrete data and we know a lot more than we did back in 2020.

That's good. And I think ultimately, I will conclude by me asking you the eternal question of, in a perfect world, how would schools actually be controlled? Should it be at a local level or not. But let's start off with, first,

we have to draw a distinction in the mind of the audience. There's what COVID did and there's

what we did in response to COVID-19. And I know there are people out there who get really

irritated because I'm in this group if we keep saying COVID did this rather than human beings

did this. And the idea there is that, of course,

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