Steven Wilson’s The Lost Decade recounts how wokeness destroyed some charter schools that were boosting the achievement of minority students across the country. Before wokeness began dismantling American institutions a decade ago,
the education-reform movement, particularly the “no excuses” charter school model, seemed poised to deliver on an audacious promise: With focus, energetic effort, and commitment, schools could close the achievement gap between black and white students, lift low-income children out of poverty, and rewrite the script of American education. For a brief, shining moment, we had it right. And then we lost our nerve….
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the first charter schools were opening and promising to be “engines of innovation” that would shake American education from its somnambulance, a new breed of inner-city school emerged: unapologetically rigorous, laser-focused on results, and built on the insistence that poverty need not be destiny. Schools like KIPP (the “Knowledge Is Power Program”), Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, YES Prep, and the Noble Schools didn’t just talk about high expectations—teachers and staff embodied and enforced them. Stealing a page from the era’s “broken windows” policing model, these schools sweated the small stuff. There were crisp school uniforms, homework assignments every night, students sitting up straight with eyes tracking the teacher, along with carefully crafted lessons and an ambitious curriculum. No more hand-wringing and no more alibis to explain away our multi-generational failure to adequately educate minority children and lift families out of poverty. More than a charter school model, no-excuses was a rallying cry….[It] enabled poor black and Hispanic kids to academically rival their privileged peers….Studies from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) offer robust evidence of extraordinary academic gains in the networks of urban charter schools that sprang from those pioneering efforts that adhered to the no-excuses model. Students in those schools were found to have gained annually the equivalent of 40 additional days of learning in math and 28 in reading compared with their peers in the public schools where they would otherwise have been warehoused. Gains were most pronounced among disadvantaged populations—black, Hispanic, and low-income students—narrowing achievement gaps in cities like New York, Houston, Boston, and Washington, D.C.
Then came the fall. Charter schools fell victim to the excesses of wokeness….The very things that had made the no-excuses approach work—its insistence on order and high standards—were recast as flaws or, worse, racist. Imposing middle-class norms on children of color was condemned as white supremacy.
By 2020, amid heightened scrutiny following George Floyd’s murder and a broader push for racial equity, KIPP announced the retirement of its iconic “Work Hard. Be Nice.” slogan, a mantra that had defined its culture of high expectations and civility since 1994….“Working hard and being nice is not going to dismantle systemic racism,” KIPP announced…..
Even before Floyd’s death, a cultural wave was sweeping through schools, universities, and reform movements with a fervor bordering on religious zealotry. Books like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist (2019) and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) became required reading for educators, administrators, and students….
The most bizarre artifact of this ostensible racial reckoning was the widespread circulation of the work of a white diversity trainer named Tema Okun, who branded traits such as “perfectionism,” a “sense of urgency,” and “worship of the written word” as hallmarks of “white supremacy culture” to be eradicated. Okun’s framework recast the strengths of high-performing urban charter schools (and schools more broadly)—discipline, focus, urgency—as liabilities, as if expecting kids to show up on time or strive for excellence was somehow a racial affront….These anti-intellectual ideas raced through charter schools and districts nonetheless, ending selective admissions for advanced programs…New York City public school administrators were trained on Okun’s framework by the schools chancellor himself….The public-education system itself, according to the widely quoted work of Bettina Love, is “invested in murdering the souls of Black children” through “systemic, institutionalized, anti-Black, state-sanctioned violence.”……
[Charter school pioneer Doug] Lemov recently told me about his visit to what was once a stellar charter school in a small Northeast city. It was the kind of school, he said, where not long ago, parents could send their kids and know they would be physically safe and their education would be taken seriously. “I went back to that school in November [2024], and it was utter chaos. Just no learning happening,” he said. The school leaders told him that they “weren’t really sure that adults should be telling young people what to do.” Moreover, they were busy “dismantling systems of oppression,” which Lemov understood to mean orderly, teacher-led classrooms, students lining up for silent hallway transitions, and other standard features of no-excuses schools, and well-run schools in general, which had now fallen into disrepair and disrepute and even become an object of derision.
“My take was, whatever systems of oppression you think you’re dismantling, they’re a lot less oppressive than the chaos that is going on in this school right now…And you should reassemble them as quickly as you can.”
‘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.” But after the charter schools’ founder Steven F. Wilson defended high expectations for kids in a an essay titled The Promise of Intellectual Joy, he was fired for “white supremacist rhetoric.”After his firing, student achievement fell like a stone, and the schools were plagued by dysfunction and disorder.
“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.
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..
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 called 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. A once “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 merit-based systems “were judged racist and removed, discipline collapsed,” Wilson says. Veteran staffers, “newly deemed white supremacists,” gave up and quit. Test scores fell.
