Every year, Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of an EducationWeek opinion blog, publishes his Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. It’s been awhile since I paid attention to Hess’s list, so I thought 2025 would be a good year to catch up on who is making the list and why.
According to Hess (based on this week’s writing in EducationWeek),
“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 of 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.”
…
“The list is comprised of university-based scholars who focus primarily on educational questions (with ‘university-based’ meaning a formal university affiliation). Scholars who do not have a formal affiliation on a university website are ineligible.”
…
Hess scores his Top 200 list by looking at eight categories: Google Scholar Score, Book Points, Highest Amazon Ranking, Education Press Mentions, Web Mentions, Newspaper Mentions, Syllabus Points, and Congressional Record Mentions.
Hess’s Top 10 Edu-Scholars for 2025 are:
Carol Dweck, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Jo Boaler from Stanford University;
Howard Gardner and Raj Chetty from Harvard University;
Shaun Harper and Pedro Noguera from the University of Southern California;
Angela Duckworth from the University of Pennsylvania;
John H. McWhorter from Columbia University; and
David S. Yeager from The University of Texas, Austin.
Carol Dweck, famous for growth mindsets, Darling-Hammond, a long-time school reformer, and Howard Gardner, the learning style expert, and Pedro Noguera, a proponent for improved equity in our public school system, have been around for a half century. Angela Duckworth, known for her “grit” research, is a more recent scholar.
Shaun Harper, Raj Chetty, John McWhorter, David S. Yeager, and Jo Boaler are newer to the public education research landscape than the others. They research such topics like mathematics education, learner equity, African-American learning conditions, and student motivation – all valuable when it comes to improving learning opportunities for our kids – all of our kids.
But I’m sorry, not having a scholar who is an expert in artificial intelligence, or a scholar who knows how to get kids to become stronger and smarter readers, are exclusions that just can’t be ignored.
If the purpose of Hess’s list is to promote those academics who are doing the best work to improve learning conditions for our K-12 students, then one must conclude that Hess’s Top 10 just comes up short.
Getting Hess to agree to expand his eligibility criteria to those who might not be affiliated with a university might be a step in the right direction, especially if he’s interested in moving the focus from school-based reformers to learner-based practitioners and advocates.
I absolutely agree with Hess when he writes, “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.”
But rewarding reform research like growth mindset, learning styles, and “grit” while ignoring expertise in learner-based strategies, reading improvement, and artificial intelligence just makes the Edu-Scholar list, at least for 2025, more of the same old same.
I’ll be away until January 14th. Until then. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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