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Education policy maven Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute think tank offers straight talk on matters of policy, politics, research, and reform. Read more from this blog.

Policy & Politics Opinion

2022 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence: Top Tens

By Rick Hess — January 06, 2022 1 min read
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Yesterday, we unveiled the 2022 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. Of course, over the years, readers have also expressed an interest in how scholars fared when it came to particular fields of study. After all, education research includes a lot of people doing very different kinds of work. Consequently, where scholars rank overall may be less telling than where they rank within their field. Today, we’ll report on the top 10 finishers for five disciplinary categories. (For a detailed discussion of how the scoring was done, see Tuesday’s post.)

Now, there can be ambiguity when it comes to determining a given scholar’s discipline. For the most part, my eagle-eyed research assistants Tracey Schirra, Jessie McBirney, and Annika Nordquist worked off CVs, relying primarily on a scholar’s earned degree. In the handful of cases where that didn’t do the trick, I made a judgment call. If you think I’ve made the wrong call on someone, just let me know, and we’ll do our best to make appropriate adjustments next year.

You can scroll through each chart below.

The tables pretty much speak for themselves. The top finisher in Curriculum, Instruction, and Administration was Gloria Ladson-Billings; in Economics, Emily Oster; in Government and Policy, Paul E. Peterson; in Psychology, Angela Duckworth (Full disclosure: Angela blogs for Education Week); and, in Sociology, Pedro A. Noguera (Full disclosure: Pedro and I coauthored a book together this past year).

Well, that wraps up the 2022 Edu-Scholar Rankings. We’ll do this all again next year, same time, same place. Next week, we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming.

For several years, following the release of the RHSU EduScholar Public Influence Rankings, Education Week Opinion has published a related series of essays that explore a pressing issue relevant to public scholarship. Read this year’s collection of essays, on how educators and researchers can work together to improve schools, here. While Education Week hosts the RHSU blog and publishes the rankings as a result, Education Week does not participate in the rankings process. The rankings are wholly an effort of Rick Hess and the RHSU selection committee.

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The opinions expressed in Rick Hess Straight Up are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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