Who Tops Their Field in the 2026 RHSU Edu-Scholar Rankings?

Yesterday, we unveiled the 2026 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. Of course, education research involves a lot of scholars doing very different kinds of work in very different fields. Thus, each year, some readers are more interested in how scholars fared within particular fields of study than in where scholars rank overall. With that in mind, today we’ll report on the top 10 finishers for five disciplinary categories that tend to dominate educational scholarship. (For a detailed discussion of how the scoring was done, see Wednesday’s post here.)

Now, there can be ambiguity when it comes to determining a given scholar’s discipline. This is primarily based on scholarly training and affiliations. In a handful of cases, the decision reflects a scholar’s personal request or my judgment call. If you think a change is in order, let me know.

You can scroll vertically and horizontally through each chart below to see all names and scores.

The tables pretty much speak for themselves. The top finisher in Curriculum, Instruction, and Administration was Jo Boaler; in Economics, Raj Chetty; in Government and Policy, Shaun Harper; in Psychology, Angela Duckworth; and in Sociology, Gloria Ladson-Billings.

Well, that wraps up the 2026 Edu-Scholar Rankings. Next week, we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.