Deborah Loewenberg Ball, Michael Bastedo, Nell Duke, Brian Jacob, and Christina Weiland make Education Week’s 2026 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings

Education Week has announced the annual 2026 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings which rank education scholars based on criteria that determines who had the biggest influence on educational practice and policy last year.

Five Marsal Family School of Education professors—Deborah Loewenberg Ball, Michael Bastedo, Nell Duke, Brian Jacob, and Christina Weiland—have made the noteworthy list of the top 200 scholars.

The list is comprised of university-based scholars who focus primarily on educational questions. To determine their ranking, each scholar was scored in eight categories including: Google Scholar score; the number of books a scholar has authored, co-authored, or edited; the scholar’s highest-ranked book on Amazon; the total number of times the scholar was quoted or mentioned in Education Week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, or Inside Higher Education during 2026; the number of times a scholar was referenced, quoted, or otherwise mentioned online in the previous year; the number of times a scholar was quoted or mentioned in U.S. newspapers; the number of times a scholar’s text(s) appeared on syllabi; and the number of times a scholar was mentioned in the Congressional Record.

The rankings were created by Rick Hess, author of EdWeek’s “Rick Hess Straight Up” blog. Hess is the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.