In this space on Wednesday, I’ll be publishing the 2022 Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, honoring 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 purpose of those rankings. (I’ll review the scoring rubric tomorrow.)
The exercise starts 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 pretty poor job of recognizing scholars who move ideas from the pages of barely read journals into the real world of policy and practice.
