“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.
From the Author
In this brief video, author Steven F. Wilson lays out the central argument of The Lost Decade—the case for a return to principles that once fueled real progress in urban schools.
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
“The Lost Decade is a tale told more in sorrow than in anger, and it is all the more devastating for its detached accounting of the indelible and avoidable damage wrought by the ideological excesses of recent years. … The first step in treating any pathology is to identify the problem. Steven Wilson has delivered a brave and exacting diagnosis. His chapter-length evisceration of the “five evasions” that deform contemporary American schooling—the therapeutic, instrumental, technological, futuristic, and political—should be mandated reading for trainee teachers and grant officers.”
– Helen Baxendale, writer and education researcher
“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.”
