“‘Anti-racist’ ideology hurt the students it was supposed to help,” notes education writer Joanne Jacobs:
In 2019, students at Ascend‘s 15 charter schools — nearly all of them living in poverty — were “reading Shakespeare in the middle grades, studying the Dutch masters, and outperforming city and statewide averages on standardized tests,” writes Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times. Then, founder Steven F. Wilson came out for high expectations in a an essay titled The Promise of Intellectual Joy, and was fired for “white supremacist rhetoric.”
Wilson is back in the news with a recently-released book, The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America. Wilson laments that anti-racist education failed students. At one school that became “anti-racist,” “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,” he notes.
Anti-racist programming failed, according to Wilson, because “indoctrination is boring.”
Obsessed with “social justice,” progressive “educators turned away from the commitments that drove their success — high expectations, relentless attention to great teaching, and safe and orderly classrooms,” he observes. “New conceptions rooted in critical theory — trauma-informed pedagogy, a culture of student fragility, and racial essentialism — overtook the K-12 sector.” Students were told they were oppressed and incapable. “Outcomes nosedived.”
In a discussion with the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess, Wilson calls for returning to a focus on teaching and academic learning. “Urban charter school networks, by single-mindedly focusing on the quality of classroom teaching, were closing achievement gaps at scale,” he notes. When social justice became the priority, “many formerly high-flying schools saw student discipline collapse and student outcomes plummet.” Telling teachers “to function as therapists and as proselytizers” was a big mistake.
Ascend charters offered a liberal arts education and a “joyful culture,” Wilson recalls. Ten years after the first Ascend charter school opened in Brooklyn in 2008, “our students had caught up with their more privileged peers statewide — and were pulling past them.”
But as Jacobs observes, “All that was imperiled when the criterion for decisions changed from what will best advanced student achievement to ‘which action is the most anti-racist'”, as Wilson pointed out; “One top-performing charter network dropped an award-winning writing program because its two authors were white women. It piloted a new social-justice-themed math program, saw weak results and adopted it anyhow, replacing a more effective math program.”
“When culture systems, including merits and demerits, were judged racist and removed, discipline collapsed,” Wilson says. Veteran staffers, “newly deemed white supremacists,” gave up and quit. Test scores fell. Today, many network leaders are “trying to restore discipline and return the focus to academics,” but they’ve shattered their school culture and “lost much of their top talent.”
School leaders need to be honest about what works and what doesn’t, Wilson adds. “Ditch the hiring essays where candidates must signal their ideological purity. Instead, screen for teachers who know their subjects and are infectious in their enthusiasm. And who have the drive and perseverance to become great teachers.”
“Antiracism” often teaches kids to hate the free-market economy and to support discriminatory practices.
“To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” claimed Ibram Kendi’s best-selling book, How to Be An Antiracist. That book was praised as a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” by the leading progressive media organ Slate. The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book was that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi in that book.
