Education Week - January 15, 2020 - 20

How I Curate My News
and Research Diet

How to Tell the
Scholarship From
the Muck

Letters to the Editor

Stephanie Shafer for Education Week

When Picking Up
Your Phone Replaces
Picking Up a Journal

Navigating a Surging Information River
An update to the 20th-century news diet
By Frederick M. Hess
HESS is director of education policy studies at the
American Enterprise Institute and author of Education
Week's "Rick Hess Straight Up" opinion blog. He has
been doing the RHSU Edu-Scholar Rankings since
2010, and teaches a bit at Johns Hopkins University, the
University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University.

or a decade, I've annually ranked the nation's
most influential education scholars in the
RHSU Edu-Scholar Rankings. After the
selection committee determines the 200
university-based researchers to include,
scholarly influence on education policy and
practice is gauged using readily accessible
measures. The metrics account for scholarly accomplishment,
book sales, visibility in the mainstream media, education-press
presence, social-media presence, and more. By design, the rankings track activity often far removed from scholarly journals,
academic conferences, and campus.
But one thing the rankings can't measure is how these
researchers equip themselves to operate in environs outside the
academy, when they seek to play a more public role. Now, the
RHSU rankings may show the results of a scholar's influence,
but they don't tell us how scholars prepare themselves for the
public square. It's an intriguing question, and one that this
package of essays is intended to help illuminate.
While accomplished scholars have spent many years
acquiring the specialized knowledge they rely upon in academic
contexts, less clear is how they acquaint themselves with the
broader questions posed by efforts to exert public influence.
This matters, a lot. After all, the annals of education are rife
with promising pilot studies and nifty academic theories that go
south when they encounter the big, mean world. Turns out that
there's a vast distance between having good ideas or promising
outcomes and translating those into successful practices or

policies. So, how do publicly minded scholars seek to make
sense of the political and practical landscape?
In the accompanying essays, three of this year's RHSU 200
offer some insights into how they go about doing just that. Here,
I'll provide a few thoughts of my own.
For me, the big story is how much connectivity and ubiquity
have changed the scholar's world. Two decades ago, as a
junior professor, I'd scrupulously read the print edition of The
Washington Post. I'd regularly read a double handful of
national and education magazines. There were no
online newsletters. If I wanted to read an academic
paper or an analysis, I usually had to get my hands
on a hard copy. Aside from books and academic
journals, that was my information intake. In those
days, a lot of time got spent tracking down this
article or finding out what that person had to say.
It can be hard to appreciate just how different
things are at the dawn of the 2020s. Today, I peruse The
Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Wall Street
Journal online. I still read the print edition of National Review
and a few familiar education publications (like Education
Week and The Chronicle of Higher Education), but mostly I'm
navigating a surging river of online content popped up by daily
aggregators riding the torrent, or digital information that has
otherwise found its way to me.
The sheer volume makes it hard to be as discriminating as
I'd like. There are only so many analyses or commentaries I'm
going to read, and distinguishing which ones are worthwhile
can be tough. As a result, I frequently default to the authors or
scholars, pundits, and outlets I trust. Of course, while this helps
to cull out the flotsam, it also skims off interesting or offbeat
takes-or ones from less congenial viewpoints.
Traversing that online river means that I spend a lot of
time reading on my laptop or my phone. That's an issue,
because I'm a lousy, lazy reader when I read that way. I'm
vastly more careful, critical, and engaged when leaning
back in a chair and absorbed in a page than when I'm
hunched and scrolling. Plus, I'm racing through one piece

20 | EDUCATION WEEK | January 15 , 2020 | www.edweek.org/go/opinion

to get to the next-leaving little time to mull an argument or
simply sit with an idea.
I cope by striving to carve out large chunks of time to sit with
extended, absorbing hard copy. I want something that allows
me to learn, think, and reflect-and that gets me out of rapid
processing mode. I try to set aside a few hours every day for this
kind of reading, and I can be pretty ecumenical about what I
pick up: Education, sure, but also history, business management,
biography, sports, pop culture. You get the idea. My intent is to
resist the mind-numbing and predictable back-and-forth
in hopes of cultivating the ability to occasionally write
something interesting or independent.
Now, I admit that I'm hopelessly out of date. I
mean, I am on Twitter (which feels mostly like a onestop shop for nastiness and press releases-but also
occasionally surfaces interesting material). Other than
that, I'm pretty much a walking, talking anachronism.
I don't listen to podcasts or watch TED talks. I'm not on
Facebook or Instagram. I don't watch FOX News, CNN, or
MSNBC. So, in that sense, I'm pretty much on a 20th-century
information diet of written news, analysis, and commentary.
Like many on the right, I get frustrated by what is (and isn't)
covered by the education press and the mainstream media, and
that so much reporting and analysis can feel almost laughably
one-sided. And that goes double for the academy and the
academic education journals. As a result, I devote a substantial
chunk of attention to serious conservative outlets like National
Review, National Affairs, The Dispatch, and The Bulwark, and
to the work produced by scholars at places like the Manhattan
Institute and AEI.
What's this all sum up to? I guess I'd say that, at least for me,
ubiquity has inverted the information challenge.
The challenge used to be: How do I find things out? Now, it's
how to avoid getting overwhelmed; ensure I'm reflecting and
not simply processing; steer clear of the sludge without missing
the hidden pearls; and make the effort to seek out and wrestle
with competing views. This is a tall order and one that I, at least,
am still a long way from figuring out, even two decades on. n

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Education Week - January 15, 2020

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