Last month, we ran the 2023 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. The exercise involves identifying 200 of the nation’s most influential education scholars and provides a useful chance to take their temperature on some big questions relating to research, practice, and policy. In that spirit, we reached out to the Edu-Scholars with a handful of short queries—and this is what they had to say.
We asked the scholars what book has most impacted their thinking over time. Four books got multiple mentions: David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s Tinkering Toward Utopia; Dan Lortie’s Schoolteacher; James Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935; and Rick Hess’ Spinning Wheels (full disclosure: that’s me).
We asked about the most interesting or illuminating academic article on education they’d read in 2022. While a wide array of work got mentioned, with popular topics including pandemic effects and early-childhood education, it seemed noteworthy that no study garnered multiple mentions (even if I’ve no clue what to make of that fragmentation).