He grades a reading curriculum the way other people grade a movie. He'll co-write a book with someone he flatly disagrees with, on purpose. And he has spent two decades telling school leaders the same uncomfortable thing: the cage door is mostly unlocked.
Every week, somewhere in Washington, a fresh education slogan gets minted. Rick Hess reads it, weighs it, and usually finds it wanting. That instinct - to poke the consensus rather than join it - is the engine behind "Rick Hess Straight Up," the Education Week column that has outlasted reform fads, secretaries of education, and the careers of most people who started writing about schools when he did.
Today he runs Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, the program he founded in 2002 and has directed ever since. He is also the executive editor of Education Next and the author of "Old School with Rick Hess." A 2022 analysis named him the most influential education researcher working at America's major think tanks. Washingtonian Magazine has put him on its list of DC's most influential education figures four years running - 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
His current beat reads like the front page of the education wars: artificial intelligence in classrooms, phone bans, reading and math instruction, school choice, federal policy, civic education, and the quality of education journalism itself. He publishes on all of it, weekly, and reminds readers each time that "Rick's takes are his alone." No team jersey. That independence is exactly why people on both sides of the fight keep reading.
Before the think tank, before the byline, there was a roomful of teenagers and a social studies curriculum. Hess started out as a high school teacher - a fact he has never let drift far from his writing. It shows up in the way he talks about schools: less as policy abstractions, more as places where a kid in the back row either gets a fair shot or doesn't.
The academic path was steep. A summa cum laude degree in political science from Brandeis. Then Harvard, twice over: an M.Ed. in Teaching and Curriculum from the Graduate School of Education, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Government. In 1997 he joined the University of Virginia as an assistant professor of education and politics. Over the years he has also taught at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, Rice, and Georgetown.
In 2002 he wrote "Tear Down This Wall," a pointed argument against the credentialing regime that controlled who was allowed to teach. The same year, AEI handed him a blank slate and the mandate to build an education shop. He has been building it ever since.
If Hess has a single idea that defines him, it is this: the rules are not the real problem. Statutes, contracts, regulations, and case law make it harder than it should be to lead a school - he grants that freely. But he argues that leaders have far more room to "transform, reimagine, and invigorate teaching, learning, and schooling than is widely believed." The deeper barrier, he says, is a "culture of can't" - a habit of mind, baked into training and incentives, that treats every obstacle as immovable.
He turned that argument into a movement of sorts with "Cage-Busting Leadership" (Harvard Education Press, 2013) and its companion, "The Cage-Busting Teacher." The metaphor stuck because it's honest about both halves: yes, there's a cage, and no, it isn't locked as tight as you think.
In 2021 Hess did something unusual for Washington. He co-wrote a book, "A Search for Common Ground," as an extended back-and-forth with Pedro Noguera - a scholar he frequently disagrees with. The whole point was to model what civil disagreement on hard education questions could look like when neither side is performing for an audience. It's the most Rick Hess move there is: take the harder conversation, on purpose, in public.
His shelf runs long - "Spinning Wheels," "The Same Thing Over and Over," "Letters to a Young Education Reformer," "The Great School Rethink" (2023), and dozens more across K-12 and higher ed. The titles change. The posture doesn't: ask the question everyone is skipping, then answer it without flinching.
“Leaders have far more freedom to transform, reimagine, and invigorate teaching, learning, and schooling than is widely believed.” RICK HESS · CAGE-BUSTING LEADERSHIP
"Rick's takes are his alone." He says it every column, and he means it - which is why both reformers and skeptics quote him.
The byline started in a classroom. He writes about schools like someone who has stood in front of one, not just studied it.
Co-authoring a book with someone you disagree with isn't a stunt for Hess. It's the method.
The "culture of can't" gave a generation of school leaders a phrase for the thing quietly holding them back.
Almost everyone in education calls him "Rick." He publishes as Frederick M. Hess. Same person, two registers.
His Twitter/X handle is refreshingly unglamorous: @rickhess99.
He has taught at UVA, Harvard, Penn, Johns Hopkins, Rice, and Georgetown - a near-tour of American higher ed.
He graded social studies homework long before he ever drafted a policy paper.