Latest news with #StevenF.Wilson
New York Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Corrections: April 27, 2025
The Big City column this weekend on Page 3 about Steven F. Wilson, who ran a charter school network, misspells the given name of an author. She is Robin DiAngelo, not Robyn. An article this weekend on Page 8 about the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History coming under attack by the Trump administration for the diversity it represents misidentifies part of the title of Marie Madison-Patton, MOCAD's co-director. She is also the chief operating officer, not the chief financial officer. The article also describes incorrectly the role of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the 'Code Switch' exhibition. The exhibition was first held at the center, not in partnership with it; a second part will open at MOCAD on May 2. This article also includes an outdated description of The Kitchen. Initially an artists collective, it is now an arts institution. This article also misstates the participation of community groups at MOCAD during the 'Gun Violence Memorial Project' exhibit. The groups will not be providing antidrug and anti-violence information as part of the exhibit. An article this weekend on Page 26 about the artist Ann Craven misspells the given name of the curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum. It is Jaime DeSimone, not Jamie. This article also misstates who would be organizing rotating displays at the show at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. They will be organized by three curators, not by students and prominent figures in the Maine art community. An article this weekend on Page 34 about Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão's first solo museum exhibit in New York misstates the name of the earliest plate made by Varejão for her show at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library. It is 'Mucura,' not 'Mucara.' An article this weekend on Page 43 about a space photography exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan reverses the descriptions of two images of a barred spiral galaxy that are displayed one above the other in the exhibition. The image on top, from the Hubble Space Telescope, looks like a swirl of light, not a circle of fire, and the bottom image, from the James Webb Space Telescope, resembles a circle of fire, not a swirl of light. An article this weekend on Page 44 about younger museum curators working to broaden audiences while focusing on populations and cultures that were previously ignored misstates the title of Nicola Lees at the Aspen Museum. She is the artistic director and chief executive, not the director. A review this weekend on Page 21 of 'On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR,' by Steve Oney, misstates the reviewer's position at the Columbia Journalism Review. The reviewer, Sewell Chan, is the publication's former executive editor. Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
New York Times
25-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
He's a Foe of D.E.I. in Schools but Not a Fan of Trump's Crusade
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.
Associated Press
12-03-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
The Lost Decade Calls for Replacing 'Social Justice Education' with Education Rich in Liberal Arts
Book finds that marginalized students suffer most from turn away from academics BOSTON, MA / ACCESS Newswire / March 12, 2025 / Five years into the rise of so-called social justice education, it is leaving the students it aims to help less educated, more vulnerable and more marginalized, according to a new book published by Pioneer Institute. 'Inundating marginalized students with messages about their oppression and supposed incapacity has been deeply harmful,' said Steven F. Wilson, author of The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America. 'We should instead work to provide all public-school students with the rich liberal arts education that has long been afforded to the privileged.' The power of a liberal arts education, high expectations, safe and orderly classrooms, and relentless attention to great teaching is proven. A Stanford University study found that in New York City, 'no excuses' schools operated by charter management organizations that embodied this approach generated an additional 110 days of learning in reading and 124 days in math in a single year. It was also clear that the schools can narrow or eliminate achievement gaps at scale. Nationwide, these 'gap-closing' schools were adding around 50,000 students-the size of the Boston public school district-each year. In Massachusetts, the framers of the 1993 Education Reform Act-William Weld, Thomas Birmingham, and Mark Roosevelt-all shared a profound formative experience: an outstanding liberal arts education. Extending the opportunity they were afforded to all students was at the heart of the reform they crafted, and the Commonwealth's public schools soon became the finest in the country and competitive with the best in the world. Urban charter public schools in Massachusetts also recorded spectacular academic gains. According to a Brookings Institution report, 'the test score gains produced by Boston charters are some of the largest that have ever been documented for an at-scale educational intervention.' The racial reckoning The racial reckoning that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer could have spurred on the transformation of urban schooling that charter schools sparked. It could have assailed big-city systems' chronically low expectations of students. The catastrophic learnings losses from the pandemic could have lit a fire under districts to accelerate instruction and urgently make up lost academic ground. They did nothing of the sort. Instead, they fueled what Wilson terms the Political and Therapeutic Evasions-the substitution of social justice training for academics, the provision of therapy in place of instruction. Academic achievement-rarely venerated in American schools to begin with-was demoted, if not scorned. A new 'social justice' approach to education newly pervades America's urban schools. It holds that objectivity and urgency are symptoms of toxic white supremacy culture, that truth is a phantasm and liberal education is elitist and colonialist. Before teaching academics, school justice educators claim, schools must address the trauma teachers and students experience from living in a white supremacist society. 'The result of seeking to 'heal' and politically 'awaken' staff and students before teaching academic content creates yet another excuse for failure,' said Director of Pioneer Education Jamie Gass. Even many gap-busting urban schools adopted this approach. In one of them, Boston Collegiate Charter School, the percentage of grade 8 students scoring proficient or advanced in English language arts (ELA) tumbled from 22 points higher than their Boston Public Schools counterparts in 2019 to nine points below that of the Boston Public Schools in 2024. Two New York City charter networks, Success Academies and Classical Charter Schools, resisted social justice education. In the spring of 2024, 95 percent or more of students in both networks were proficient in math and 82 percent in ELA. After Success, the four next largest New York City charter networks embraced, to varying degrees, social justice education. By 2024, students in their schools saw their proficiency advantage over the New York City Public Schools shrink by two thirds. By 2024, students in networks that pivoted the hardest to Antiracism were scarcely more likely to be found proficient in ELA than district school students. 'Literacy and numeracy are the keys to upward mobility,' said Pioneer Executive Director Jim Stergios. 'The movement to bring about justice by watering down curricula has clearly failed.' At the mid-point of the decade, it is time to choose another path. 'We can equip all children with a rigorous and engaging liberal arts education that arouses curiosity, venerates knowledge, cultivates compassion, and upholds reason, Wilson said. We can return to creating a new generation of schools that lift achievement for all students and build a more equitable and just society.' ### About Steven F. Wilson Steven F. Wilson is a senior fellow at Pioneer Institute. An education entrepreneur, policymaker, and writer, Wilson founded and built Ascend Learning, a network of fifteen tuition-free, liberal arts charter schools in Central Brooklyn. The Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University identified Ascend as a 'gap-busting' network for its success in closing-and reversing-achievement gaps of race and income. His most recent venture, the National Summer School Initiative, provides accelerated instruction in the wake of the pandemic to 150,000 urban students. 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. His new book, The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America, will be published by Pioneer in March. About Pioneer Institute Pioneer empowers Americans with choices and opportunities to live freely and thrive. Working with state policymakers, we use expert research, educational initiatives, legal action and coalition-building to advance human potential in four critical areas: K-12 Education, Health, Economic Opportunity, and American Civic Values. (202) 988-3222
