Four USC Rossier School of Education faculty members are among an elite list of American scholars singled out by education policy maven Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute in his Edu-Scholar Public Influence rankings for 2014.

Dominic Brewer, Morgan Polikoff, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Katharine Strunk are among the list of the top 200 education scholars whose work has most influenced the national education discourse.

The list uses traditional academic measures, such as the Google Scholar H-Index, and nontraditional measures, such as media/blog mentions, Amazon book rankings and Klout scores, which include Twitter presence. The rankings are also determined through consultation with education thought leaders.

In another breakdown of the rankings for the top 10 assistant professors, Polikoff was No. 2 and Immordino-Yang was No. 5, making USC Rossier and Harvard University the dominating universities in this group.

In the overall rankings, which calculated the influence of more than 20,000 university-based faculty tackling educational questions in the United States, Brewer ranked No. 82.

Brewer is a labor economist specializing in the economics of education and education policy. At USC Rossier, he serves as the Clifford H. and Betty C. Allen Professor in Urban Leadership, and he holds courtesy appointments at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and at the USC Price School of Public Policy. He is president-elect of the Association for Education Finance and Policy.

In the 119th spot of the overall rankings was Polikoff, an assistant professor at USC Rossier. His work employs quantitative methods to address questions relating to the design and effects of standards, assessment and accountability policies. Polikoff’s work currently focuses on the new Common Core standards and their application and assessment. He is studying the alignment of current mathematics textbooks to the Common Core.

Ranking at No. 146 overall was Immordino-Yang, a neuroscientist and human development psychologist who studies the neural, psychophysiological and psychological bases of social emotion, self-awareness and culture and their implications for learning. She is an assistant professor of education at USC Rossier, an assistant professor of psychology at USC Dornsife’s and Creativity Institute and a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Program Faculty at USC.

Strunk, who was ranked at No. 194 overall, is an assistant professor of education and policy at USC Rossier with a courtesy appointment at the USC Price School of Public Policy. Her areas of expertise include teachers’ unions and education governance, teacher labor markets and accountability policies. She is currently heading a multiyear nationally funded research effort on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s public school choice initiative.

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