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Education Opinion

2016 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence: Top Tens

By Rick Hess — January 07, 2016 1 min read
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Yesterday, we unveiled the 2016 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. From years past, we’ve learned that a lot of readers are curious as to how scholars fared when it came to particular fields or disciplines. After all, education researchers work in a wide variety of fields. Today, we will report on the top ten finishers for five disciplinary categories, as well as the top ten junior faculty. (For a detailed discussion of how the scoring was done, see Tuesday’s post.)

Now, there’s a touch of ambiguity in determining each scholar’s discipline. For the most part, my uber-RAs Jenn Hatfield and Kelsey Hamilton worked off of CVs, relying primarily on a scholar’s earned degree. In the handful of cases where these were sufficiently ambiguous, I made the judgment call based upon scholarly appointments and bodies of work. Still, if you think I’ve made the wrong call on someone’s discipline: a) let me know, and we’ll make appropriate adjustments for next year, and b) chill out, it’s an imperfect world.

You can click on each chart for a larger view.

Curriculum, Instruction, and Administration

Economics

Government/Policy

Psychology

Sociology

Junior Faculty

The tables pretty much speak for themselves. The top finishers were all familiar names. The top finisher in Curriculum, Instruction, and Administration was Linda Darling-Hammond; in Economics, it was Rick Hanushek; in Government and Policy, Gary Orfield; in Psychology, Howard Gardner; and, in Sociology, Pedro Noguera.

Beyond the disciplinary breakdowns, I want to give a nod to junior faculty who fared especially well. Given that the RHSU Public Influence rankings, by design, favor scholars who’ve assembled bodies of work and had sustained impact, these junior faculty deserve particular notice. USC’s Morgan Polikoff topped the junior faculty chart this year. Rounding out the top five were Harvard’s Marty West, Harvard’s David Deming, Harvard’s Jal Mehta, and Columbia’s Judith Scott-Clayton.

That wraps up our coverage on the 2016 Edu-Scholar rankings. Be sure to check out EdWeek’s opinion spread on the rankings online next week, and also in their next print issue. We’ll do this all again, same time, same place, next year. In the meantime, we’ll get back to regularly scheduled programming.

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.