There's an older-but-still-good post by /u/Irishfafnir/ about the regard for Jackson's ranking by historians.

It's possible you're thinking in more cultural-evolution terms, which case I'll point you to this answer of mine about 1950s textbooks and the Trail of Tears. Quoting the relevant portion:

... a great of many of the textbooks explicitly were trying to be progressive, it's just their focus was elsewhere. Where this can be most clearly seen is a 1959 book by E. Merrill Root with the eye-popping title of Brainwashing in the high schools; an examination of eleven American history textbooks. The author's thesis is that textbook authors of the 50s leaned hard to introducing collectivist ideas and claims outright the presence of Communist brainwashing.

As sensational as Root's pitch was (it is almost a perfect time capsule of the Second Red Scare) it is true the labor movement started to get more space; a review of one of the more popular textbooks of the era (originally published in the 40s but used through the 50s) states "Since the progressive movement has all too frequently been shunted to a small space in high-school textbooks in American history, it is gratifying to see, especially in a book for the senior level, a complete unit devoted to this crucial phase of American history."

This had the odd side effect of Jackson being portrayed in a positive light (Root calls him the "darling" of the "liberals"). Jackson, at least as perceived at this time, was a "man of the people", and as an "anti-establishment" candidate. Thus, even if it weren't for the issues I cited earlier, the textbook authors were focused too much on that aspect to want to linger on the full horror of the Trail of Tears.

For a time, Jackson stood in as an exemplar of standing up against the establishment, and this was what progressives focused on in the 1950s, so they were willing to overlook his treatment of Native Americans. This did not go unnoticed at the time; Root in the book I mentioned rakes progressives over for betraying their ideals. This was slowly chipped away at so that by the end of the 1970s Jackson could be a straight-up villian in the most progressive texts (Zinn's A People's History of the United States was 1980) but mainstream textbooks have a lag, and despite all that Jackson still has notable accomplishments and historians include both good and bad in their assessments.