Yesterday, we unveiled the 2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. Of course, education research includes a lot of people doing very different kinds of work. Thus, over the years, readers have been intensely interested in how scholars fared within particular fields of study. Where scholars rank overall may be less telling than where they rank within their field. Today, we’ll report on the top 10 finishers for five disciplinary categories. (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. For the most part, my research assistants work off CVs, relying primarily on a scholar’s degree. In the handful of cases where that didn’t suffice, I made a judgment call. If you think I’ve made the wrong call on someone, let me know, and we’ll do our best to make appropriate adjustments next year.

You can scroll through each chart below.

The tables pretty much speak for themselves. The top finisher in Curriculum, Instruction, and Administration was Linda Darling-Hammond; in Economics, Raj Chetty; in Government and Policy, Shaun Harper; in Psychology, Carol Dweck; and, in Sociology, Pedro Noguera.

Well, that wraps up the 2025 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.