| 摘要 | Over the past two decades, K–12 school reform has been dominated by testing, standards, and charter schooling. Those issues have been the fault lines in the education reform wars, with celebrity participants like Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, and Diane Ravitch dominating the battlefield. Well, we’ve come to a pivot point. As reported last spring, gubernatorial candidates across the land almost never mentioned the old stalwarts like school accountability and teacher evaluation, but had plenty to say about new darlings like career and technical education, and early childhood education.
Earlier this month, that shift was illuminated by the results of the 2019 RHSU Edu-Scholar Rankings, an annual analysis that one of the present authors publishes in the pages of Education Week. The rankings include the top 200 scholars in the nation (as chosen by a high-powered selection committee) who are then scored on a basket of metrics, including press mentions, book sales, scholarly citations, and appearances in the Congressional Record. The 2019 rankings show that the academic—not just political—landscape of education reform has shifted drastically in the past half-decade. Familiar 21st Century reforms like accountability and school choice are out, while the issues of mindset and race are decidedly in.
It’s not just the political talking points that have shifted, but the intellectual and academic landscape as well. Five years ago, the top five education scholars focused on issues like teacher evaluation, school choice, and the linkage between school funding and student achievement. In 2014, for instance, Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond, an influential thinker on teacher quality, and NYU’s Diane Ravitch, a blistering critic of school choice and accountability, ranked one and two respectively. Each was mentioned in the education press at least three times as often as any other education scholar.
This year, on the other hand, three of the top five slots were occupied by scholars of “mindset” issues, such as social and emotional learning. Five years ago, on the other hand, only one of the top five focused on “mindset” skills (Howard Gardner, with his influential theory of “multiple intelligences”). While, in 2014, none of the top ten scholars focused on critical race theory or free college, this year the top ten was populated by outspoken champions of each.
The most popular books penned by the top education scholars reveal a similar trend. In 2014, based on Amazon sales data, the best-selling books included Darling-Hammond’s Getting Teacher Evaluation Right and Ravitch’s Reign of Error. This year, the top books included For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, and Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
A similar story emerges we track the relative visibility of some select scholars over time—especially those who played an outsized role when it came to shaping school reform in the Bush-Obama era. Stanford economist Rick Hanushek, a leading authority in making the case for K–12 accountability, ranked #4 nationally in 2014, but #23 in 2019. Another Stanford economist, Caroline Hoxby, who gained acclaim for her hugely influential research on school choice, ranked #11 in 2014, but #40 in 2019. Historian Ravitch, who emerged during the Obama years as a prominent critic of “reform,” had ranked #1 or #2 nationally for the better part of a decade, but this year slid to #10.
Meanwhile, the spotlight has increasingly shifted to scholars whose primary research interests tends to focus on questions of mindset or the racial dimensions of schooling. Prominent examples include: Stanford’s Carol Dweck, who was #1 in 2019 but unranked in 2014; Wisconsin-Madison’s Gloria Ladson-Billings, who was #4 in 2019 but #18 in 2014; Stanford’s Jo Boaler, who was #5 in 2019 but unranked in 2014; UPenn’s Angela Duckworth, who was #14 in 2019 but unranked in 2014; and USC’s Shaun Harper, who was #21 in 2019 but #127 in 2014.
Notably, it’s not the case that attention is pivoting from advocates to critics, or from one accountability-fueled measure (such as the Common Core) to another (such as teacher evaluation). And it’s not obviously a case of the baton being passed from senior scholars to more junior ones. Rather, this data suggests a decided shift of attention from those focused on one set of reforms to those focused on another.
It appears that education’s big shift is not just about new legislation, political agendas, and public opinion, but that it extends to who gets celebrated as an expert. That, in turn, has big implications for which voices predominate in the public square, what research gets conducted, what evidence is regarded as authoritative, and which ideas are likely to shape the national discourse in the decade to come. And, upon a closer look, this may very well prove to be a self-reinforcing cycle, with this rotation of experts helping to play a role in driving education’s constant churning of reform. |
