“Social justice education” is not the long-awaited correction to America’s procession of exclusionary, anti-intellectual school reforms. It is its apotheosis. It will leave America’s most marginalized students less educated, more excluded, and more vulnerable. At mid-decade, it is time to change course.
At the start of the decade, hundreds of new public schools were posting arresting results, closing and even reversing longstanding gaps in student achievement and offering the nation’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—safe and orderly classrooms, high expectations, and relentless attention to great teaching. 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. The faculty room turned rancorous. Students, inundated by messages of their oppression and incapacity, grew listless and alienated. Test scores nosedived.
In time, both social justice education and the backlash it has spawned on the right—book bans, 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 this book, 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.
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.
Praise
“Candor is rare in education circles. But someone needs to name what we all know to be true: Our schools are increasingly held hostage to the political and cultural agendas of both the left and the right. Whatever the merits of such agendas, they have diverted schools from their core educational mission. The tragic result is that we are falling to prepare students for success in life. And yet we can, Wilson argues in this riveting analysis. We’ve lost our way in the fight for better schools. Pick yourself up, he says. Get back to the battle. We can win yet.”
– Christopher Cerf, former Superintendent of Newark Public Schools and New Jersey Commissioner of Education
“The highest praise one can offer is envy: I wish I’d written this book. Steven Wilson’s The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America is not just another education book; it’s a barn-burner that fearlessly confronts the failures and evasions that continue to plague American K-12 education. Wilson, a true visionary, asks the essential question: “Can we provide a rich and engaging liberal arts education—the education long afforded children from privilege—to all children?” His unapologetic answer is a call to action to return to what has been proven to work in education, to reclaim lost ground, and to ignite a long overdue era of educational excellence.”
– Robert Pondiscio, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
“The Lost Decade is a thorough and damning critique of trendy, ill-considered educational ideas that have crippled the learning of millions of American children. But Wilson does not dwell on critique alone, he demonstrates with data the excellence and impact of a high-quality liberal arts education for all. We would do well to learn from the lessons The Lost Decade has to teach us.”
– Angel Adams Parham, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia
“The Lost Decade brings the saga of American education’s resistance to the academic curriculum, chronicled so well by Diane Ravitch and E.D. Hirsch, into the 21st century. While Wilson’s brisk rebuke of the Antiracist and therapeutic turn in education will please some readers and outrage others, his insistence that academic rigor and joyful challenge remain at the heart of the classroom should inspire all of us.”
– Ashley Rogers Berner, Director, Institute for Education Policy, Johns Hopkins University
Upcoming Events
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Webinar: Steven F. Wilson’s The Lost Decade
Wednesday, March 19
3:00-4:15 PMJoin Pioneer Institute for an exclusive webinar celebrating its newest publication, The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America.
About Steven F. Wilson
For three decades, Steven has sought to spark change in urban public education—offering fresh ideas in his writing and research, shaping legislative change, and opening new schools that prove what’s possible.
Steven is a senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research.
Most recently, Steven launched the National Summer School Initiative (NSSI) to create a new model for accelerating learning and building teacher capacity. Since its inception in 2020, NSSI has partnered with schools and districts to educate more than 150,000 students, including at hundreds of sites in New York City.
Steven founded and built Ascend Learning, a network of tuition-free, liberal arts charter schools that today educates 6,000 students in Central Brooklyn. Ascend demonstrated the power of a warm and joyful school culture focused not on ensuring compliance but on fostering student agency. The Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University identified Ascend a “gap-busting” network for its success in closing achievement gaps of race and income.
His first book, Reinventing the Schools: A Radical Plan for Boston, drove the development and passage of the Massachusetts charter school law. Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools, won the Virginia and Warren Stone prize for an outstanding book on education and society.
Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research
For thirty years, the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research, a nonprofit institution based in Boston, has offered fact-based research on how to achieve world-class schools, affordable healthcare, reliable public transit, an attractive economic climate, and accountable government.
Our mission is to develop and communicate dynamic ideas that advance prosperity and a vibrant civic life in Massachusetts and beyond.
Our vision of success is a state and nation where our people can prosper and our society thrive because we enjoy world-class options in education, healthcare, transportation and economic opportunity, and where our government is limited, accountable and transparent. We value an America where our citizenry is well-educated and willing to test our beliefs based on facts and the free exchange of ideas, and committed to liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise.