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.
