In 2008, Steven F. Wilson, who had been an adviser to the former Massachusetts governor, William Weld, on education policy, opened a charter school to educate children from low-income families, in central Brooklyn. Over the years that followed, his vision grew to a consortium of 15 schools, the Ascend Network, serving roughly 5,500 students, 84 percent of whom were living in poverty. They were reading Shakespeare in the middle grades, studying the Dutch masters, and outperforming city and statewide averages on standardized tests. Then in 2019, Mr. Wilson was canceled.
Schools and nonprofit organizations had seemed to convert overnight to the teachings of the authors Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo and their emphasis on antiracist education. In the wave of all this, Mr. Wilson had posted a long essay on the Ascend website titled “The Promise of Intellectual Joy.” In it, he blamed both progressives and conservatives for the disappearance of intellectual rigor in the country’s public school system. Rich academic study was under attack from the left “as ‘whiteness,’” at the risk of reducing intellectual expectations, he wrote.
Shortly after, a member of his staff circulated a petition calling out Mr. Wilson’s thinking as an example of “white supremacist rhetoric.” An exacting manager, a middle-aged Harvard graduate, the son of a Harvard professor and the brother of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Mr. Wilson provided an easy target for charges of academic elitism. His largely white board of trustees fired him.
Since he left Ascend, he co-founded the National Summer School Initiative, which has worked to help students recover from pandemic-era learning loss. And now he has written a book, “The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America.” In it he argues that antiracist education failed students in terms of achievement. At one school that implemented the programming, the percentage of students meeting or exceeding standards on the math section of the SAT plummeted from 41 percent in 2017 to 4 percent in 2024.
The book arrives just as the Trump administration is threatening to revoke funding from K to 12 schools unless administrators can verify that they have eliminated programs in diversity, equity and inclusion.
Our conversation — about the aftermath of his dismissal, shifting attitudes toward D.E.I. and the repercussions for public schools — has been condensed.
G.B.: You got caught up in an intense cultural moment. What was leaving Ascend like and how have you processed what happened?
S.W.: It was a moment of moral panic in America. I was arguing that the canon belonged to all. I was not claiming in any way that it was the province of white people.
To my mind, Ascend had been a clear success. I was baffled. Did I think that being canceled, as it were, meant that I wouldn’t work again? I don’t think so. But I had an enormous amount of anger, and it took me some time to work through. It was a searing experience. There was a deep conflict between the liberal arts commitment Ascend had made and the anti-intellectualism of the doctrine I was being asked to implement.
Can you say more about what you were being asked to do?
I think of the programming as a kind of secular religion, a progressive penitence. The real work of advancing equality is never mentioned. One exercise that consultants recommend is for students to visit a grocery store to observe who is “enforcing white supremacy culture.”
The test of the decision is always, “Will it advance student achievement?” The new criterion was, “Is Choice A more antiracist than Choice B?”
Your book looks at charter school networks in New York, Boston and Chicago and their pivot to antiracist programming. At the Chicago network, the outcomes seemed especially dismal. Did these results surprise you?
I was struck by the magnitude of the fall. Schools and networks that stuck to their mission of academic excellence found that test results were stronger even through the pandemic. The internal pressures to make changes were terrific, but some leaders just said: “Nope. We’re here to educate.”
Why do you think this sort of antiracist programming failed?
Because children were bored. Indoctrination is boring.
Did you find a generational divide among teachers dealing with all these changes?
Yes. There becomes this tremendous gulf between newcomers and veterans. Charters are so interesting, because they have such high staff turnover. This made them more vulnerable to these ideological shifts, which provided a quicker visibility into the effects of these ideas.
Aside from the right wing effort to dismantle D.E.I., there seems to have been a cultural shift among people across political lines who have found it problematic.
There has been a recognition that “wokeness” — a term I never use in the book — is receding. But while it may be receding in the popular debate, it is very much institutionalized in K-to-12 education.
What is your view of the federal government’s current approach?
It counters illiberalism with more illiberalism. I think it must be fiercely resisted. They are attempting to hold up funds for poor students and disabled students to bully schools into their preferred teaching. Harvard can tap its endowment, potentially; school districts cannot.
Part of the problem is that D.E.I. can seem vague to the point of being meaningless now.
At the height of Black Lives Matter, schools adopted programming that they bought from consultants, off the rack. The content was all the same. But you can imagine forms of diversity, equity and inclusion that do not seek to accuse and divide.
The edict of the Trump administration puts all the various interpretations in the same basket. Is Black History Month D.E.I.? Is a Latino students’ organization D.E.I.? Of course not. But state education agencies are legitimately anxious that if their districts engage in those teachings they might see their federal funds rescinded.
What is the path forward?
Universities are the centers of knowledge production. Schools are the means of knowledge dissemination. We need to take the kind education long afforded the privileged and provide it to all children.
Let them wrestle with the claims of Kendi; let them wrestle with the claims of MAGA. And let them sort it out.
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
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