Lost Decade in Education

• Book: The Lost Decade. Steven Wilson.

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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)."

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