On Wednesday, I’ll be publishing the 2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, tracking the 200 education scholars who had the biggest influence on the nation’s education discourse last year. Today, I want to take a few moments to explain the nature of the exercise. (I’ll reveal the scoring formula tomorrow.)
I start from two simple premises: 1) Ideas matter, and 2) People devote more time and energy to those activities that are valued. The academy today does a passable job of acknowledging good disciplinary scholarship but a poor job of recognizing scholars who move ideas from the pages of barely read journals into the real world of policy and practice. This may not matter much when it comes to the study of physics or Renaissance poetry, but it does if we hope to see researchers contribute to education policy and practice. Of course, it’s vital that those same scholars engage constructively and acknowledge the limits of their expertise.
After all, I’m no wild-eyed enthusiast when it comes to academic research. I don’t think policy or practice should be driven by the whims of researchers. I think that researchers inevitably bring their own biases, that decisions around education policy and practice are value-laden, and that decisions should therefore be driven by more than the latest study.
That said, I absolutely believe that scholars can play an invaluable role when it comes to asking hard questions, challenging lazy conventions, scrutinizing the real-world impact of yesterday’s reforms, and examining how things might be done better. Doing so requires both that scholars engage in these endeavors and that they do so in responsible ways. Of course, while it’s incredibly tough to evenhandedly assess how constructively they’re playing this role, it’s more feasible to gauge which scholars are wielding the most influence. From there, we can make our own judgments about whether their contributions add value to the public discourse.
Let’s change gears. In baseball, there’s an ideal of the “five-tool” ballplayer who can run, field, throw, hit, and hit with power. A terrific ballplayer might excel at just a few of these, but there’s a special appreciation for the rare player who can do it all.
Similarly, the extraordinary public scholar excels in five areas: disciplinary research, scholarly analysis, popular writing on policy and practice, convening and shepherding collaborations, and speaking in the public square. Scholars who are skilled in most or all of these areas can cross boundaries, foster crucial collaborations, spark fresh thinking, and bring research into the world of policy and practice in smart and useful ways.
The contemporary academy offers many professional rewards for scholars who stay in their comfort zone and pursue narrow, hypersophisticated research, but few for five-tool scholars. One result is that the public square is filled with impassioned voices (including scholars who act more like advocates than academics), while we hear far less than I’d like from careful, scrupulous researchers who are interested in unpacking complexities and explaining hard truths.
That’s where this exercise has the potential to help. Over the past decade, I’ve heard from dozens of deans and provosts who’ve used these rankings to help identify candidates for job openings or to inform decisions about promotion and pay. I’ve heard from hundreds of scholars who’ve used these results to start discussions with department chairs about institutional support or to illustrate their impact when applying for positions, grants, fellowships, or tenure. And a who’s who of prominent institutions have bragged about the performance of their faculty in the rankings, spotlighting activity that too rarely gets such notice. Plenty of this has been in the service of scholarship that strikes me as problematic. But enough of it has involved rigorous, conscientious scholars that this seems worth the time.
The Edu-Scholar Rankings reflect, in roughly equal parts, the influence of a scholar’s academic scholarship and their influence on public debate. The various metrics are intended not primarily as tallies of citations or sound bites but as a “wisdom of crowds” attempt to gauge a scholar’s public footprint in the past year.
Now, no one should overstate the precision of this exercise. It’s a data-informed conversation starter. It’s best to think of it as analogous to similar rankings of ballplayers and mutual fund managers.
And, finally, I want to reiterate that a scholar’s influence is not a measure of whether their work is socially beneficial. These rankings speak to scholarly influence; they aren’t designed to judge the quality of scholarly work or whether scholars are engaging in constructive ways. Rather, the rankings offer a window into which scholars exercise outsized influence and how they do so.
In a related vein, it’s worth making one final point: Readers will note that the rankings do not address teaching, mentoring, or service (even though I suspect that teaching and mentoring are the most important things that most scholars do). These scores are about public influence; they aren’t a summation of a scholar’s contribution to the world. Such is life.
