Yesterday, we unveiled the 2015 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-RA Jenn Hatfield 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
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; tops in in Economics was Eric Hanushek; tops in Government and Policy was Gary Orfield; tops in Psychology was Howard Gardner; and tops in Sociology was Pedro Noguera.
Beyond the disciplinary breakdowns, I wanted to be sure to recognize junior faculty who fared especially well. Given that the RHSU Edu-Scholar rankings, by design, favor scholars who’ve assembled bodies of work and sustained influence, these junior faculty deserve particular note for effectively engaging in the public square. USC’s Morgan Polikoff topped the junior faculty chart this year, aided mightily by some of the timely work he’s doing related to the Common Core and the Obama administration’s ESEA “waivers.” Rounding out the top five were Benjamin L. Castleman of the University of Virginia and Harvard University’s Jal Mehta, David Deming, and Marty West.
That wraps up Edu-Scholar week. We’ll do it all again, same time, same place, next year. Meanwhile, on Monday, we’ll get back to regularly scheduled programming.