---

PODCAST: | “Freedom to Learn:” What Caused the “Lost Decade” in K-12 Education?

---

A frank discussion with Steven Wilson on social justice ideology, colleges of education, and unions

I’m fortunate that part of my job entails reading thoughtfully researched and written books. I found Steven Wilson’s new book, The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America, fascinating, and appreciated the opportunity to talk with him on the Freedom to Learn podcast about the entities that forced K-12 education’s “lost decade” on students, families, and school communities. We examined:

• How colleges of education teach — or preach, really — ideology;
• How union power and demands constrain district leadership;
• How the “no excuses” charter model initially transformed outcomes for low-income students, and why some charter networks abandoned that focus;
• How the Anti-racism fervor engulfed the K-12 sector; and
• What it will take to return to academic excellence.

Steven has been at the center of education reform for more than three decades, from his role in Massachusetts’ landmark 1993 Education Reform Act to founding Ascend Learning, a “gap-busting” network of charter schools in Brooklyn, NY. He is a senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research.

---

Please follow or subscribe to Freedom to Learn on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released every Thursday.

---

Highlights from our conversation have been edited for length and clarity.

Your book, The Lost Decade, Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America addresses both your story, as well as the charter school movement, what motivated it, what has impacted it recently; the roles of teachers unions and colleges of education,;districts’ resistance to reform; campus illiberalism; and the Anti-racism fervor that hit all aspects of education in the last decade. What inspired you to tackle so many topics, many of which are often off limits in K-12 education circles?

Steven Wilson: The Lost Decade is the one we’re in, the 2020s. My contention is that we have unfortunately kind of lost our way in school reform. It was necessary to set out some history so we can understand how we arrived at this incredible moment of confusion. I think of charters as a new innovation, but we’re talking about 30 years of work. Why did it start? Why did people want to open these new schools? What was the problem that they were tackling? So that’s why the book has that kind of span.

But the real focus of the book is this moment of what I consider to be illiberalism on both the left and the right and how that is harming schools and students.

Colleges of education don’t get much attention, even in education reform circles. You make a pretty clear case that they are driving mediocrity and ideology in K-12 education. Was that your goal?

Steven Wilson: Well, it certainly is an important point to get across. I did feel it was necessary to be very direct and very honest about that. This is where future teachers are socialized and acculturated.

They emerge from teachers’ colleges with a worldview that is very consistently applied, and it is very explicitly anti-knowledge, anti-intellectual.

I spent a year or so at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, quite a while back, and remember students in class actually hissing when the words “knowledge” or “facts” came up. These are going to be teachers. They should revere knowledge and academic learning, but that was definitely not the case.

The most commonly assigned book in ed schools is Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. And that book has the contention that the American education system is stuffing kids with facts like a “banking model” and is very derisive of the idea of knowledge-based learning, of acquiring a sense of the world. Education should instead be about political indoctrination and preparation for a violent overthrow of society. I don’t agree with that. We should honor kids enough to let them make up their own minds about how they see the world.

And there are a lot of other books pretty much in the same vein that are hostile to traditional academic learning and don’t see that as the mission of teaching and becoming a teacher. Instead, the mission is explicitly political or explicitly therapeutic. And I see both of these as evasions from the true obligation, which is to create students who have the knowledge, understanding, and true power to be able to flourish.

And I consider it to be condescension to say that we’re empowering students if we’re denying them an education.

Do you think the public realizes that colleges of education don’t value knowledge-based instruction? They certainly weren’t teaching reading effectively and resisted the science of reading.

Steven Wilson: Absolutely. And, by the way, we’ve known how to teach reading for 40 years, going back to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Project Follow Through. It found phonics-based instruction far more effective than other methods.

No, I think that most people don’t have any sense of what is happening in schools of education and how harmful it is to teaching and to the practice of education. So we have a lot of work to do there. There are exceptions, like Relay Graduate School of Education, which is an alternative teacher training program which is much more skills-based. We should be teaching practical techniques of great teaching, like those Doug Lemov writes about. We know what works.

You write about the incredible amount of work that the “no excuses” charter networks put into training up their teachers.

Many of those places either didn’t hire from traditional teacher training grounds and instead chose to hire Teach for America students who came out of high-performing colleges and universities because those are the academically devoted teachers that they wanted. Or, they said, ‘we will first have to start by undoing everything that our teachers have been taught and remaking them with a different set of beliefs and practices.’ That’s a remarkable statement to make.

You were frank about the caliber of students entering colleges of education. You contrasted that with early Teach For America recruits in high-performing charters.

Steven Wilson: If we’re serious about bettering schools, we have to confront that we’ve traditionally hired teachers from the lower part of their high school classes instead of the top. The highest-performing countries educationally hire their most capable students, They compensate them very handsomely and it becomes a prestigious profession. If we’re serious about achieving that ourselves, we need to change the way that we hire and promote and compensate teachers.

Teaching is perhaps the hardest job in the world. It is incredibly brutal, difficult work, and we should esteem it much more than we do. We should pay teachers more than we do. So there are lot of changes that we need to make, but it does begin with where we recruit them from.

And part of the problem is that the most capable graduates of high schools and universities are going to be deterred from entering the teaching profession by the requirement of going to an unrigorous school of education. That’s just a harsh fact that we have to confront.

It is easier to adopt a single ideology and preach it than to create complex lessons engaging multiple viewpoints.

Steven Wilson: One-sided presentation is absolutely stultifying to students. There’s nothing more boring than being told what to think all day for the entire year. What’s exciting is students sparring over ideas, hearing one side, then the other, capably expressed. Particularly in this hyper-polarized culture that we’re living through and enduring at great cost, we need students to be exposed to varying points of view. Better still is asking students to articulate the opposing view as best they can. That deepens understanding. That almost never happens in classrooms today. Part of it, as you say, is it might be easier to prepare of lessons that way. But the other fact is teachers themselves may never have been exposed to diverse viewpoints in their preparation.

Let’s talk about teachers unions. You’re not afraid to point out when union demands have harmed students and K-12 outcomes. Randi Weingarten, the AFT president, has been singled out as this lone, almost cartoon union supervillain in social and conservative media. I think that does a huge disservice to everyone’s awareness of the impact of the state and the local unions. For example, you detail the local union demands during the COVID era closures that put an end to education and learning for a really long time.

Steven Wilson: It’s not helpful to villainize individuals. I think that we should have a lot more unionization in this country, not less. [But] public sector unions remain extraordinarily strong, specifically in education, and are having a deleterious effect, as I argue in the book. But that is not in a sense to blame the unions. Actually management is at fault. Across the negotiating table over the last several decades, they have basically given up their power to lead. So principals and superintendents have no authority to do what they need to do, which is things like hiring and firing effectively, promoting the people who are killing it and removing those who aren’t, being able to write job descriptions, being able to address the problem of seniority-based assignments.

All these policies that are harming children, we have given up. We have ceded our authority to the union. So that needs to be undone.

Once you’ve given up authority, it’s remarkably difficult to regain it. And that’s why charters are so important because charters create a new operating system under which you can actually achieve real success. I’m deeply skeptical that in our largest urban systems, that even remains possible.

Anecdotally, I live in Hudson, New York, a small city. We have one of the most expensive and least effective school systems in the state. It’s had a revolving door of superintendents. Why would anyone think that the next person is going to be successful when the other ones haven’t?

It’s a structural problem, not a problem of leadership. And the union authority is the biggest obstacle.

I didn’t quite follow that it is somehow management’s fault for giving up their authority.

Steven Wilson: It is the union’s responsibility to fight for what they think their membership needs. It is the responsibility of the executive to fight for the conditions under which they can be successful. That’s the idea of an adversarial negotiation. Now, you could argue in a high-minded way that the union should not have demanded those things because they were unhelpful to kids and that’s a reasonable point of view. But I actually fault management more for not fighting for what it needed to be successful in the classroom.

You point out that management, if you’re talking about school boards, are elected by union members because the elections often happen in off years and the unions get their members out to vote. So the union-backed candidates become management.

Steven Wilson: And that is true for superintendents and mayors. You’re absolutely right. You cannot prevail in a Democratic city in becoming the mayor without the support of union. That’s where we are. That’s an absolute fact.

And then once elected, you can’t cross the union. And that’s why reforming big city school systems from within is probably an impossibility at this point. And we should be grown up enough to just be able to look that straight in the eye and say, that isn’t going to happen.

So what we have to do is build around it instead. And this is why charters are so important. We have to create new schools that are not subject to those same constraints and that are absolutely hell bent towards excellence.

Let’s go back to what we were talking about earlier. The charter management organizations of that fall under this “no excuses” category are no longer what they were when they were originally conceived. Can we delve into that?

Steven Wilson: “No excuses” means that the adults in the building would stop making this litany of excuses for why their kids aren’t learning. They would no longer blame families. They would no longer blame not having enough money. They would pledge to one another, ‘within these four walls of the school building, we can achieve at an exceptional level for all students.’ The North Star of these schools was excellence. It wasn’t just one lever. There was no silver bullet. No, it was 100 different things that they had to do well. And if you pay attention to all 100 of those things, guess what? You start having stunning levels of student achievement. We would call it the 101% solutions, meaning all those little things you had to do from how students arrived to classes in the morning, to how lunch works, to discipline, to pedagogy. That was the miracle, and it worked incredibly well.

And then circa 2014, it started to unravel. And that’s really the subject of my book. And we turned away from the North Star of achievement toward the North Star of social justice education and we undid everything that had been achieved.

There are a lot of schools and networks that are still doing fabulous work who never let that into the door, but there are others that have absolutely plummeted.

Success Academy comes up in your book.

Steven Wilson: Success Academy, the largest network of charters in New York, has nearly universal proficiency levels, 95% of students proficient each year in English and math. And they’re not alone. Success is just one. They’ve actually been outpaced by a classical education network called Classical Schools in New York, which is small, but actually doing even better. So, we absolutely know that this is possible.

And these folks never went that way. They said, ‘nope, not doing that. We believe in knowledge. If we really want to empower kids, we afford them knowledge. We recognize that their inheritance is the world’s knowledge and we’re going to give it to them.’

They said no to the encroaching social justice movement, to this illiberalism that took over a lot of the K-12 world, including the charter sector. KIPP didn’t say no. KIPP is another well-known network within the movement. I remember when their motto was changed and got a lot of attention, but maybe people didn’t realize it went so much deeper.

Steven Wilson: The motto was, “Work hard. Be nice.” That motto came from the teachers that the founders, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, learned from in Houston when they were starting that first summer with their one classroom summer school. And down the hall was a black educator who explained to them that being nice actually mattered, that you had to create a classroom where kids were kind to one another and respectful of one another if we really expected students to learn. This is where they got the motto from.

KIPP said that they’re abandoning that motto because it’s white supremacist and it reflects a racist attitude. And I think this is anything but the truth. Some portions of KIPP have lost their way and other parts have not. And by the way, the schools that didn’t lose their way were often led by black principals who said, ‘nope, not changing what we’re doing because I know it works.’

KIPP wasn’t alone with this. BES — could you address that one?

Steven Wilson: BES trained aspiring principals to open their own schools. And there’s a quite extraordinary constellation of high performing charters around the country that were started by BES fellows who’d been through this training program. The emphasis of BES was on knowledge creation, great teaching and instruction, and it absolutely worked. And it said to those fellows, ‘you’re going to go in and do the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life, you’re going to work like crazy to create these high performing schools, but it’s going to be the thrill of a lifetime.’

And they too, at BES entirely lost their way by going over to so-called Anti-racism.

And they actually repudiated everything they had done. They said BES was a racist place and we’re going to make it an Anti-racist place. And they turned against all of what they had done. This focus on great teaching and learning, on the kinds of warm and safe classrooms where students could thrive. All of this was undone. And if you look at the recently formed schools by BES fellows, they are very low performing as a result. It’s extremely hard to see.

You made the point that parents weren’t asking for this. Parents chose these schools because they wanted safe environments for these kids. They knew that the residentially assigned public schools in their area were places of danger and chaos.

Steven Wilson: Yes, if you go back to the foundation of the beginning of charter schools in the 90s, it arose in opposition to the actually unsafe, often violent places where students were going to school. And so the immense popularity of early charters in particularly in low-income communities was because parents knew that safety was their first responsibility towards their children. And they wanted places that could assure it.

But what is the corollary to that is just as important. You also have the problem of low-level disruption in classes. Kids talking in the back of class, the graffiti on the walls of the classroom, all these signals that say that we’re not serious about learning and that prevent the teacher from teaching and the students who want to learn from learning. The focus of these “no excuses” schools was that we’re going to sweat the small stuff so we don’t end up sweating the big stuff, the actual violence and risk to students. If instead we pay attention to all these small things, we will create learning environments where students can thrive and real exciting learning can take place.

I used to tour a lot of these schools back in the day. Those teachers were working so hard. Those school leaders were constantly looking for opportunities to improve and to push themselves as leaders. The students were rising to the expectations that were laid out. It was really inspiring. What happened, Steven? What changed?

Steven Wilson: One thing that happened is that the kind of cultures and disciplinary environments that we’re describing, where there was order, where there were systems of merits and demerits, for example, were criticized as being racialized, as being white supremacist, as having echoes of America’s egregious past of racial injustice. And as a result the call was to dismantle those oppressive systems so that we could create an Anti-racist classroom. What was overlooked by this is that when these practices were done well, and I would concede they were not always done well, but when they were, these were actually lovely environments where kids could actually thrive and learn.

There is no more hellish classroom than the one where you’re stuck in all year long, where no real learning is happening because the teacher is constantly being interrupted. The teacher is constantly saying, ‘stop doing this, stop doing that.’ We as adults visiting a classroom can last about 10 minutes in a room like that before we run out of it because we’re so upset by what we’re seeing. Imagine being a child in a room like that for 180 days a year where no learning can happen. So there’s nothing desirable or Anti-racist or empowering about a room like that. It’s sheer hell for teachers and students alike. And what happened when these new notions of Anti-racism arrived is that once orderly rooms became the rooms we just described. And schools and classrooms collapsed into disarray, often into violence, and certainly into low achievement. And so it absolutely had the reverse effects of the good intentions that it began with.

Is anything abating in all of this? Is the fever breaking?

Steven Wilson: Yes, I think it is. I think we have reached and passed peak “woke.” But I would also say that these ideas are very much institutionalized in schools and districts at this point. So while the popular cultural currents have changed, and there’s a recognition that some of these beliefs have been very harmful, in schools they’re very much established.

So it’s going to be a lot of work to restore the focus on great teaching and learning and to return to that North Star of academic excellence. A lot of work remains. We have barely begun.

And we’ve talked about the forces that push against that with the colleges of education. One additional force that you mentioned are the DEI consulting firms that popped up. They’re in there with their contracts, doing the professional development, doing these audits, and locking in this mindset.

Steven Wilson: Of course we all are working toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. These are all good things. We live in a diverse society. We want our graduates to be cosmopolitans. We want them to know the world and know different traditions and have read broadly across cultures and race and beliefs.

But the consultants who came in were fixated on a particular training material by a woman named Dr. Tima Okun that said that things like knowledge and perfectionism and objectivity and punctuality were symptoms of a so-called white supremacist worldview. Worship of the written word — that’s the best example to give. Can you imagine a more anti-intellectual statement that the written word should not be worship, should not be revered? Well, of course it should. That’s what schools are about. Children should fall in love with great books and great writing that moves them and stimulates them and activates them to try to change and better the world. So what a preposterous thing to say and how deeply harmful to teachers and to students these ideas were.

I think some of that is receding, but an awful lot of it is still there. So there’s a lot of fighting, a lot of change that has to be made, and a lot of public recognition that has not yet happened. We need to be able to say publicly what so far is only being said behind closed doors, which is that we made a terrible wrong turn. Let’s acknowledge it. Let’s shout it from the hilltops and let’s get back on track. That hasn’t happened yet.

Okay, so I was going to ask you to wrap us up with what’s the path forward. So, brutal, honest acknowledgement that this was the wrong path. Follow models that are working like Success Academy and the classical charter network…

Steven Wilson: Yes, and get back to what you were doing, which was working so well for kids.

Look, we’ve been able to do this in other areas. We’ve been able to take policy proposals that were simplistic and excessive, like defund the police, and say, ‘no, that’s not actually what we need to do.’ The same thing is true in education. We can look at this and say that this call for Anti-racism with a capital A was the wrong path.

And we can go back and we can say, our focus is making every classroom be an effective learning experience, where kids come out buoyed by a small advance. They know a little something they didn’t know before. They feel through the repeated experiences of that kind that, ‘you know what, I’m good at school. I’m going somewhere. I’m learning. I’m successful.’ If that’s the mission, the operating principle of schools, we are doing great things for kids.

When we lose track of that and we think that teachers should function as therapists or as political indoctrinators, when we say that they should be recruiting children like child soldiers into some political mission, then we know we’ve gone wrong. That’s just offering up condescension. If we really respect kids, we will focus on educating them. That is hard, hard work. Let’s get back to that.

I often ask my guests to tackle pervasive myths. You do that in defense of the charter sector in the book. Is there one that bothers you the most when it comes to charter schools (that are on the right course) that you’d want to tackle today?

Steven Wilson: I think the one that bothers me the most is the idea that “no excuses “schools are harshly disciplined, unpleasant places for kids. And I think that’s one of the most harmful myths about charters. These schools are, in fact, wonderful places for kids. They’re loving places. There are places that treat kids with tremendous respect, believe in them, believe in their futures. And as a result, these are often schools where you see not just 100% college acceptance, but you see incredible rates of college persistence and students going on to graduate from college and enter important careers.

Another one would be is that these schools are succeeding because they’re funded a much higher level or they select their students. Neither of those common myths is true. They function for less money than conventional schools around them. And there is no evidence of a selection effect driving their extraordinary results.

---

Access our full conversation on your favorite podcast app. Please follow Freedom to Learn on Apple Podcasts to receive new episodes every Thursday morning!

---

---