Education Next

About Education Next

Education Next — Journal Profile

Education Next is an American journal of opinion and research on education policy, published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in association with the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. Its own identification line, printed on its official About page, gives Education Next (Print), ISSN 1539-9664 and Education Next (Online), ISSN 1539-9672. It is a quarterly journal in print with a continuously updated website, founded in 2001, and it occupies a distinctive place in American education publishing: part scholarly journal, with a formally peer-reviewed research section, and part magazine of argument, polling and commentary aimed at policymakers as much as at academics.

This profile replaces a short template summary. It is built from the journal's own About page and peer-review policy, its own account of its founding and renaming, a Harvard Kennedy School description of the journal, independent reporting on its history, and its OpenAlex source record read directly by ISSN and then by source identifier. Where sources differ — on who counts as its publisher, on its citation counts, and on its early sponsoring institutions — the differences are stated with their sources, because each version is true of a particular aspect or period of the journal's life.

At a Glance

History: Education Matters Becomes Education Next

The journal's first issue was published in February 2001, and its first two issues, in spring and summer 2001, ran under the banner Education Matters. In its fall 2001 issue the journal explained the change in its own words: the first two issues had run as Education Matters, and, to avoid conflicts with other entities using that name, it would become Education Next, with its commitment to incisive commentary and research unchanged. The editors explained the new name as forward-looking — education's time had come, and the sector was ripe for major change. This matters for anyone searching library catalogues: material from the first two issues belongs to the same journal under its earlier banner title, not to a separate predecessor publication, and catalogue records that split the two names are describing one continuous journal.

The founding mission statement, still printed by the journal, is worth quoting in substance because it continues to describe the product accurately. In the stormy seas of school reform, the journal would steer a steady course, presenting the facts as best they can be determined, giving voice without fear or favour to worthy research, sound ideas and responsible arguments; bold change is needed in American kindergarten-to-grade-12 education, but the journal partakes of no programme, campaign or ideology, and goes where the evidence points. Independent observers have not always accepted that self-description at face value — the journal is widely associated with the mainstream school-reform agenda of choice, charter schools and teacher accountability, and one dean quoted in reporting on it called it a cross between a journal and a magazine, more digestible than many academic journals. Both things can be true at once: the journal publishes serious, peer-reviewed research and original polling, and it publishes it in a magazine's voice, for readers who govern schools rather than only study them.

The people behind the journal have been stable by academic-publishing standards. Paul E. Peterson, director of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance, helped launch and grow the journal and served as a central editorial figure for its first two decades; a 2016 Harvard announcement already described Martin R. West as editor-in-chief, and the journal's current About page lists West in that role, with executive editors Anna J. Egalite, Frederick M. Hess, Michael B. Horn, Marci Kanstoroom and Michael J. Petrilli, and Michael Poor as managing editor. Its editorial advisory board, as currently listed, includes Chester E. Finn Jr., Jay P. Greene, Eric A. Hanushek, William G. Howell, Caroline M. Hoxby, Kirabo Jackson and others — a roster of the most cited scholars in American education-policy research, which explains both the journal's access to strong research manuscripts and the reform orientation critics attribute to it.

Scope: What Education Next Publishes

The journal's subject is American education policy, with kindergarten-to-grade-12 schooling at its centre. Its recurring territory, visible across its issue archive and its topic organisation, includes school choice in all its forms — charter schools, vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, education savings accounts, magnet and inter-district choice, and homeschooling; standards, testing and accountability, including the Common Core era and its aftermath; teachers and teaching, including tenure, merit pay, teacher evaluation, preparation and the teaching workforce; school spending and education finance; governance and leadership, from school boards and mayoral control to state and federal roles; courts and education law; early childhood and preschool; special education; curriculum; technology and blended learning; public opinion on education; and international comparisons that bear on American policy. Its topic list also reaches character education, media coverage of education, and the politics of education reform itself.

Three content forms define the journal. The first is the research section: empirical studies, subjected to the peer-review process described below, which have repeatedly entered legislative and scholarly debate — a study of how lost school time from snow days affects test scores, and a randomised study of the educational value of art-museum field trips, are the two examples the journal's own editors and outside reporters cite most often. The second is the EdNext Poll, its long-running survey of public and teacher opinion on education issues, published with detailed methodology — the 2016 edition, for example, reported a nationally representative stratified sample of 4,181 adults, with oversamples of teachers and of parents of school-age children — and tracked across years so that opinion trends, not just snapshots, can be read from it. The third is features, forums and commentary: magazine-length argument, point-and-counterpoint exchanges, interviews, book discussion and reporting on schools and reform in practice. A submission that does not fit one of those three forms — a purely theoretical paper with no policy bearing, or a local programme description with no generalisable evidence — is unlikely to fit the journal, however good it is.

Peer Review: the Journal's Own Policy

Because Education Next is often casually described as a magazine, its peer-review arrangements deserve exact statement, and the journal states them itself. All papers published in its research section have been subjected to peer review. Papers that have not been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal are submitted to scholars with expertise on the topic; the process is single-blind, meaning authors are not told the reviewers' identities, while reviewers' feedback is provided to authors; reviews from at least two scholars must be received before publication. Papers that have already been accepted by a peer-reviewed academic journal receive additional review only at the editors' discretion. Editors may ask for revisions in light of reviewer comments, and the decision to publish rests on the reviews and the editors' own assessment of quality. The journal also states that opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of its editorial board or its sponsor.

Two practical consequences follow. First, a research author submitting an unpublished empirical paper should expect genuine external review by at least two experts, and should write the paper to survive it — methods, identification strategy and limitations stated plainly. Second, the peer-review claim attaches to the research section; a feature or commentary piece in the same issue has been edited, not peer reviewed, and anyone citing the journal should distinguish the two, as careful scholars citing it do.

Publishing Arrangements and Access

The publisher most consistently named for the journal is the Hoover Institution at Stanford University: Harvard Kennedy School describes Education Next as a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard Kennedy School, and the journal's own About page names the Harvard programme as its sponsoring institution, gives its editorial correspondence address at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and carries a Harvard College copyright line. Independent reporting at the journal's fifteenth year named the Hoover Institution as publisher with Harvard's programme and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation as sponsoring institutions — the Fordham association belongs to that earlier account and is not repeated on the current About page, so it is recorded here as historical rather than current. This site's stored publisher taxonomy for the post names the Hoover Institution, which is consistent with the journal's own presentation; the earlier template version of this page, however, displayed only a numeric code where the publisher's name should have been, a display fault in the stored data.

On access, precision matters. The DOAJ search API returned no record for either the print ISSN 1539-9664 or the online ISSN 1539-9672, in plain or ISSN-scoped searches at the time of checking, and the journal is not presented here as a DOAJ-listed open-access journal. It sells print subscriptions and single issues, maintains a substantial free website where much current content can be read, and is indexed for libraries through education databases such as ERIC, whose records for its articles identify the Hoover Institution in Stanford as publisher of record for those items. That mixed model — subscription print, extensive free web presence, library indexing — is a magazine-journal model, not an author-pays open-access model, and no article processing charge schedule is published on the About page consulted for this profile.

Metrics and How to Read Them

The earlier template version of this page gave the journal an h-index of 27, without a source. The OpenAlex record for this journal, resolved first through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint for 1539-9664 and then fetched directly as source S2764872482, returned 1,035 works, 5,815 citations, an h-index of 31 and an i10-index of 151, with publication years in that record running from 2001 to 2023. Two successive direct fetches returned identical figures. On their face those numbers are stronger than the stored figure, and they fit the journal's real footprint: a relatively small number of heavily discussed research articles and polls can lift an h-index quickly, and an i10-index of 151 means a substantial body of pieces cited at least ten times.

Two cautions apply. First, OpenAlex names a host organisation for this source that is plainly wrong for this journal — a commercial publisher that has never published Education Next. The journal's publishers are the Hoover Institution and the Harvard programme, as its own site and Harvard's own announcement state; the aggregator host field should be disregarded entirely, and it is mentioned here only so that no later reader mistakes it for a fact. Second, citation metrics understate this particular journal's influence in a specific way: its poll results and features are cited heavily in policy documents, journalism and legislative debate, venues that scholarly citation indexes count weakly or not at all. Conversely, its metrics should not be compared naively with those of a conventional research journal, because a share of its contents is commentary whose influence is real but differently routed. Use the OpenAlex figures, with their source named, as evidence of scholarly uptake; do not use any h-index, from any source, as a summary of the journal's policy influence.

The journal's topic profile in OpenAlex is a useful cross-check of scope: its leading topics there are school choice and performance; educational assessment and improvement; politics, economics and education policy; diverse education studies and reforms; and legal issues in education. That is the same map the journal's own topic organisation gives, which increases confidence in both.

Who Should Submit, and Who Should Read It

The natural authors are education researchers with an empirical result that speaks to a live policy question, scholars who can write for an educated non-specialist reader without diluting the evidence, and practitioners or policymakers with a well-argued, evidence-grounded case. The journal's own route for unsolicited contributions is its editorial email at the Harvard Kennedy School, given on its About page; authors should query or submit there rather than through any third-party service, and should state clearly whether a manuscript is offered for the peer-reviewed research section. The natural readers are policymakers and their staffs, school and district leaders, education journalists, foundation officers and academics — in that order of design. A doctoral student mining it for literature should read the research section as scholarship and the rest as primary evidence of the reform debate itself, which is also a legitimate scholarly use.

Education Next should not be confused with other titles its name resembles. It is not a general education-news magazine, and it is not the earlier-banner version of itself: as its own fall 2001 note explains, Education Matters was this same journal's first banner, not a rival. Searches of this site by either of its ISSNs returned only this post, slug searches for its earlier banner name returned no post, and no duplicate record for this journal was found on this site.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Education Next's ISSNs? Print ISSN 1539-9664 and online ISSN 1539-9672, as printed on the journal's own About page.

Who publishes Education Next? The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, with the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School; Harvard describes it as published by both. The earlier version of this page showed only a numeric code in answer to this question; that was a display fault in the stored data.

When was it founded? In 2001. Its first two issues appeared as Education Matters; it became Education Next with its fall 2001 issue, by its own account.

Is it peer reviewed? Its research section is. The journal's own policy requires reviews from at least two scholars, single-blind, before a research paper is published. Features and commentary are edited, not peer reviewed.

Who is its editor? Martin R. West is listed as editor-in-chief on the journal's About page.

Is it open access? It is not listed in DOAJ for either ISSN, based on direct DOAJ API searches. Much current content can be read on its website, and it is indexed in library databases such as ERIC, but it operates a subscription print and mixed web model rather than an author-pays open-access model.

What are its citation metrics? OpenAlex source S2764872482, fetched directly, returned 1,035 works, 5,815 citations, an h-index of 31 and an i10-index of 151. This site's earlier stored figure of 27 had no source attached. The host-organisation field in the OpenAlex record is incorrect for this journal and should be ignored.

Sources and Verification Notes

Sources consulted directly for this profile: the journal's official About page, which provides its mission, masthead, sponsoring institution, both ISSNs, correspondence addresses and its full peer-review policy; the journal's own fall 2001 editorial note and its tenth-anniversary material, for the founding date and the Education Matters banner history; a Harvard Kennedy School announcement describing the journal as published by the Hoover Institution and the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, and identifying its editor; ERIC records for journal articles, confirming the print ISSN and the Hoover Institution as publisher of record for indexed items; independent reporting on the journal at fifteen years, for frequency, founding publisher and sponsor history, attributed as reporting rather than as the journal's own statement; and the OpenAlex record obtained first through its ISSN endpoint and then by direct fetch of source S2764872482, twice with identical results, for work and citation counts, with its incorrect host field identified in the text. DOAJ was checked through its search API with plain and ISSN-scoped queries for both ISSNs, returning no record. Fields no consulted source supported — in particular an author-charge schedule — are stated as not published rather than estimated.