Lost Decade in Education

* Book: The Lost Decade: : Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America. Steven Wilson. Pioneer Institute, 2025.

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From the publisher:

""Social justice education," the decade's de facto K-12 school reform strategy, is harming the very students it aims to help, Steven F. Wilson argues in his provocative new book, The Lost Decade. The savage disparities in student outcomes and future prospects that the new education aims to overcome are worsening. If we are to at last build a just, equitable, and inclusive society, we must afford every child the education long granted the privileged: an expansive liberal arts education.

"In this searing and indispensable account, Wilson reveals how an intolerant social justice ideology has damaged public education and derailed successful reforms. Courageous and truth-telling, The Lost Decade is an urgent call to action, outlining a path forward to better schools by someone who has actually done it! —Ian V. Rowe, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

At the start of the decade, hundreds of new public schools were posting striking results, closing and even reversing longstanding gaps in student achievement and offering America's most marginalized students a reliable path to college and career. Each year, these "gap-closing" schools added 50,000 seats, equivalent to opening a new district the size of Boston's. The racial reckoning of 2020 could have spurred on this vital transformation. Instead, it arrested it. In the name of advancing social justice, educators turned away from the commitments that drove their success — high expectations, relentless attention to great teaching, and safe and orderly classrooms. An array of new conceptions rooted in critical theory — trauma-informed pedagogy, a culture of student fragility, and racial essentialism — overtook the K-12 sector. Students were inundated by messages of their oppression and incapacity. The faculty room turned rancorous and classrooms disorderly. Student outcomes nosedived.

In time, both social justice education and the backlash it has spawned on the right—DEI crackdowns, book bans, and teaching prohibitions—will end in failure, their ideas discredited, their forces spent. America's most marginalized students will be left less educated, more excluded, and more vulnerable. In The Lost Decade, Wilson offers an alternative course for American education. We can commit to equipping all children with a liberal arts education — an education that arouses curiosity, cultivates compassion, and upholds reason."

(amazon)

Review

Eboo Patel:

"In 2020, Steven Wilson, former education adviser to the governor of Massachusetts, was condemned as racist and fired from his job for writing an essay on the educational philosophy underlying the network of charter schools he founded. Here’s my favorite line from that essay: “every student can experience the satisfactions of their intellect … the heady delight in connecting ideas, the pleasure of the imagination, and the reward that follows mental struggle.”

That should be the rallying cry and anchoring conviction of every educator.

There are indeed racist educational philosophies out there. One such philosophy is that poor minority kids cannot achieve at the same level as rich white kids, a view neatly summed up in the George W. Bush line, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Another is believing that only white people or Europeans have contributed books worth reading, philosophies worth discussing, or art worth viewing.

Steven Wilson was guilty of neither. The almost entirely poor minority students in his 15 Ascend charter schools were reading Baldwin and Shakespeare, and appreciating paintings from Jacob Lawrence to the Dutch Masters. Furthermore, they were scoring higher than their white peers at public schools on standardized tests and going to selective colleges.

What exactly did Wilson do wrong? According to The New York Times, some younger staff at the Ascend schools considered his essay “racially traumatizing,” likely because it directly criticized the progressive educator Tema Okun’s profoundly destructive idea—as expressed in her popular 1999 workbook on “Dismantling racism”—that linear thinking, objectivity and respect for good writing are features of “white supremacy culture.”

A petition was circulated denouncing Wilson and his “white supremacist rhetoric,” and Wilson was fired. The Times reported that the board who fired him was almost entirely white. Indeed, the lone black member of the board resigned in protest at that decision.

It is a revealing detail. Study after study demonstrates that white liberals are far more likely than minorities to view political and social issues through a racial lens. As Matt Yglesias documented in his seminal 2019 essay, “The Great Awokening,” it is white liberals who say in surveys that African Americans and Latinos require “special favors” to get ahead, not African Americans and Latinos.

Indeed, in a conversation I had with Wilson, he wryly noted that while he knew many rich white funders and young progressive teachers who wanted to make antiracism the center of the curriculum, he has never met a black parent at a charter school who said “please increase the amount of antiracist programming” or “I want you to teach my child to reject white oppressor knowledge.” In fact, Wilson contended, these are not just profoundly damaging educational theories—they amount to spiritual and moral violations. Education should focus on nurturing students’ potential, not indoctrinating them into a worldview that requires them to believe they are victims.

Wilson has now written a compelling book, The Lost Decade, on how to build excellent schools where learning is revered and students from all backgrounds thrive. He demonstrates how the antiracist and social justice pedagogies that were in vogue over the last ten years have contributed to a nosedive in student achievement in once excellent charter school networks. In one network, scores rated as “meeting or exceeding” standards on the SAT math section plummeted from 41% of the 2017 class to 4% of the 2024 class (although Covid likely also played a role).

...

In his book, Wilson locates the root cause of the problems that hit charter schools over the last ten years in an interesting place—the lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses. “Aspiring teachers today have increasingly limited exposure in their own education to a pluralist pedagogy where they encounter competing views,” he writes. “As K–12 teachers, this leaves them ill-prepared, if not disinclined, both to develop unit plans that invite students to grapple with diverse viewpoints and to encourage spirited classroom discussion. Writing a lesson that indoctrinates students in one claim is easy—but stultifying for children.”

Wilson’s insight underscores the foundational role that higher education plays in our civil society. When universities are healthy, our civil society tends to be healthy. Andrew Sullivan saw this particular sickness coming in his prescient 2018 essay “We All Live On Campus Now.” The thesis was simple: the punitive left-wing orthodoxy that governed campuses in the 2010s would soon find its way into the sectors (media, education, nonprofits) most likely to hire those graduates. Yascha Mounk referred to this as the “short march through the institutions.” "

(https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-pedagogy-of-the-empowered)