Howard Professors Toldson and Fenwick Among 200 Most Influential Scholars in the Nation

2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings lists scholars who shape education.

Howard University psychology professor Ivory A. Toldson, Ph.D. and education professor Leslie T. Fenwick, Ph.D. have been ranked among the top "200 university-based scholars in the United States who did the most last year to shape educational practice and policy." The recognition is part of the release of the 2025 Rick Hess Straight Up Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings published in Education Week. Howard is the only Washington D.C.-based university with an affiliated scholar appearing in the top 100 and the only historically Black college or university with scholars appearing on the list overall. Other schools whose scholars appear on the list include Harvard, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Vanderbilt, Duke, and Columbia.

Ivory Toldson, Ph.D., is a professor of counseling psychology, the chief of research for Concentric Educational Solutions, and the editor-in-chief of "The Journal of Negro Education." He served as the executive editor of the "Journal of Policy Analysis and Research," published by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. He also served as the executive director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs in the Obama administration and as the director of education for the NAACP. He has authored over 100 scholarly works, including "No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear about Black People." Dr. Toldson has been the principal investigator for more than 20 National Science Foundation grants totaling over $11 million. He earned a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Temple University, a Master of Education degree from The Pennsylvania State University, and bachelor's degree in psychology from Louisianna State University. He was also awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters from Florida Memorial University. 

To be included on the 2025 Rick Hess Straight Up Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings list, scholars are evaluated with regards to a range of quantitative and qualitative criteria including how many times their work is cited and sold, how high their books are ranked, and how many times they are mentioned in the media and online. 

These criteria includes their Google Scholar Score, which measures how many widely cited articles, books, or papers a scholar has authored. Next, an Amazon search is used to determine how many books the scholar has authored which are available through Amazon, along with a calculation representing the scholar's highest-ranked book according to Amazon's algorithm. Finally, media and online mentions are tallied by measuring the number of times the scholar was mentioned in "Education Week," "the Chronicle of Higher Education," or "Inside Higher Education," along with the number of times the scholar was mentioned in a U.S. newspaper and how many times they were mentioned online in general. 

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