Just a heads up, next week we’ll be running the 2017 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. We’ll be recognizing and ranking the 200 edu-scholars who had the biggest influence on the nation’s education discourse last year. The exercise is designed to balance the academy’s unfortunate tendency to discount scholars that make real, relevant contributions to vital public policy debates.

The Public Influence Rankings aim to recognize university-based education scholars, of any discipline or bent, for their contributions to the public square. Edu-scholar influence encompasses both the corpus of one’s scholarly work and one’s centrality to public discussion in the past year. After all, a scholar’s influence is a product of several factors, including their body of scholarship, the degree to which their work has influenced today’s researchers, their willingness to wade into public discourse, and the energy and effectiveness with which they write for and speak to popular audiences.

The rankings will include 200 leading education scholars. The ranked scholars include the top 146 finishers from 2016 (the top 150 minus three retirements and one international relocation), augmented by 54 “at-large” additions. The additions were named by the RHSU selection committee, a group of 27 accomplished and disciplinarily, intellectually, and geographically diverse scholars (the full list will be posted and acknowledged next week). Bottom line: Regardless of where they rank, each of the 200 scholars deserves a lot of credit just for cracking the list. And, since that credit isn’t always forthcoming in academe, I’m hoping we can help correct for that—if only a little.