Six SESP Faculty Members Among Most Influential Academics
Six Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy faculty members were named to Education Week’s annual list of 200 influential academics in education policy, highlighting the School’s research eminence and influence.
The Northwestern faculty members included in the 2020 Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings are:
- David Figlio, the Orrington Lunt Professor of Education and Social Policy and Dean of SESP
- Larry Hedges, Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Social Policy
- Kirabo Jackson, Abram Harris Professor of Education and Social Policy
- Carol Lee, Professor Emeritus, Learning Sciences
- Diane Schanzenbach, Margaret Walker Alexander Professor of Human Development and Social Policy and director of the Institute for Policy Research
- James Spillane, the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor in Learning and Organizational Change
View the 2020 Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings
The rankings were created by Education Week blogger Frederick M. Hess, to recognize scholarship that impacts the real world. Hess, the American Enterprise Institute director of education policy, used nine metrics to calculate how well university-based academics move ideas from academic journals into the national conversation.
The list includes the top finishers from the previous year plus ‘at-large’ nominees chosen by a committee. Here’s a full explanation of the scoring process.
The rankings, of course, “include only a sliver of the faculty who are tackling education or education policy," Hess wrote. Given that the ratings are a snapshot, the results also favor scholars who published a successful book or a big study over the last year, he said.
Still, the top five best-selling books penned by the EduScholars are the same as last year and none were published in 2019. They include Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success —14 years after its initial publication; Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (2016), Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2018), Jo Boaler’s Mindset Mathematics: Visualizing and Investigating Big Ideas (2015), and Christopher Emdin’s For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood (2016).