Near the start of each of the last two years, I commented on some aspect of my colleague Rick Hess’s annual Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, which recognize the 200 academics who, in the opinion of Hess and his committee, have had the greatest influence on educational policy and practice in the previous 12 months. In 2023, I noted how few academic humanists appear on the list, which is instead the domain of economists, psychologists, sociologists, and other social scientists. And in 2024, I wrote about the linguist John McWhorter, an outlier who has been ranked in the top 10 for the past three years and who delivered an excellent talk last October in AEI’s American Dream Lecture Series, “Language and the Left: Can Words Create Justice?”
The latest rankings are now out, and in the spirit of tradition, I have decided once again to issue a comment. My subject this time around is the institutional affiliations of the 200 worthies.
Sixty institutions are represented, which is rather a lot. But it will come as a surprise to no one that there are not exactly 3.33 scholars associated with each. In particular, Harvard can boast 28 ranked academics, while there are 27 institutions with just one apiece. The champions besides Harvard are Stanford (17), Columbia and UCLA (10), UPenn and UVA (8), UC-Berkeley (7), Brown, Northwestern, and USC (6), and the Universities of Michigan and Arkansas (5).
The reason to highlight these numbers is easy to explain. For all that the reputations of America’s elite universities have taken a hit in recent years, it remains the case that these are the ones the public thinks of first. Harvard may no longer be Harvard, but after 389 years, it still holds sway—and, despite what many critics say these days, not wholly wrongly. It will take more than a few scandals, even highly visible ones involving calls for the annihilation of Jews, for its influence to wane to the point that no one cares about it any longer.
What Hess’s rankings show is that Harvard and Stanford have so many widely influential faculty members in the realm of education that policymakers ignore such places at their peril. By “such places,” I mean ones that are consistently near the top of the mother of all such rankings, put out each year by U.S. News & World Report, which currently calls Harvard and Stanford America’s third- and fourth-best “national universities,” respectively—plus (to return to the other Hess champs) Northwestern #6, UPenn #10, Brown and Columbia tied at #13, UCLA #15 (#1 “top public school”), UC-Berkeley #17 (#2 public), the University of Michigan #21 (#3 public), UVA #24 (#4 public), and USC #27. (I will return to the University of Arkansas.) There are reasons to be skeptical of these rankings (one is the mismatch between how the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and outlets such as U.S. News view the same institutions), but there is no reason to doubt that an awful lot of people care about them.
To be sure, the Edu-Scholar Rankings need to be taken with a grain of salt as well. Hess is aware of this. Some of his highly ranked faculty members have very good ideas: Take Paul E. Peterson of Harvard’s Department of Government (#24), famous for his work on school choice. Others don’t. (Exhibit A might be the highly controversial Jo Boaler of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, ranked #10.) As Hess notes, his rankings are “an attempt to gauge influence” rather than merit: Not all the worthies may be worthy, but as long as the public pays attention to them, all of us had better do so.
The biggest winner is probably the University of Arkansas. In broad public perception, it is obviously different from all the other institutions mentioned above: U.S. News ranks it #189 (#103 public). And yet fully half of the 10 members of the faculty involved in “Education Reform” in its College of Education and Health Professions made it onto Hess’s latest list: Patrick J. Wolf (#33), Harry A. Patrinos (#133), Robert Maranto (#149), Gema Zamarro Rodriguez (#171), and Joshua McGee (#197). That’s awfully impressive—and what’s especially impressive is that, as far as I can tell, all of these scholars are sensible, with some tackling issues, like groupthink, that the educational research establishment prefers to avoid. This would seem to be the legacy of Jay Greene (#82 in the 2021 rankings), who left Arkansas in 2021 after 16 years to join the Heritage Foundation and recently co-authored with Hess a damning AEI report on the politicization of academic associations. It’s a terrific legacy.
Joshua T. Katz
Rick Hess’s Edu-Scholar Rankings, Elite Institutions, and the University of Arkansas
January 17, 2025
aei.org