May 29, 2025
In her review of The Lost Decade for Education Next, “The Burden of Bad Ideas,” Helen Baxendale praises the book’s “brave and exacting diagnosis” of what ails our schools. “His chapter-length evisceration of the ‘five evasions’ that deform contemporary American schooling—the therapeutic, instrumental, technological, futuristic, and political—should be mandated reading,” she writes.
Photo: Alamy Images
May 26, 2025
The left-wing cancellations of yesteryear teach us how to respond to the right-wing censorship of today, writes Eboo Patel in a provocative new essay for Persuasion. “Why speak about the saga of Steven Wilson in 2025? After all,” Patel writes, “we are living in an era of industrial scale, right-wing, state-sponsored cancellations without due process.”
Photo: Allison Shelley for the Washington Post via Getty Images
May 23, 2025
Ravi sits down with Steven for a candid conversation about his new book, The Lost Decade, and the current state of education reform. They reflect on what’s changed in schools over the past decade, exploring the tension between pushing for academic excellence and navigating a fast-changing cultural and political landscape. They also unpack what it means to build school cultures that are both rigorous and inclusive, the role funders play in defining priorities, and why it’s more important than ever to have honest, and sometimes uncomfortable, conversations about the future of education.
May 16, 2025
In an op-ed today in the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Where California’s well-intended social justice education went wrong,” Steven says we mock students when we claim to empower them while denying them the tools of influence—to reason, to analyze, and to express themselves persuasively in speech and writing.
Photo: Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG
May 15, 2025
“Steven Wilson’s The Lost Decade is not just a book—it’s a requiem,” Robert Pondiscio writes. “It’s a mournful recounting of a moment when the education-reform movement, particularly the no excuses’ charter school model, seemed poised to deliver on an audacious promise: With focus, energetic effort, and commitment, schools could close the achievement gap between black and white students, lift low-income children out of poverty, and rewrite the script of American education.”
Photo: Courtesy of Ascend Learning
May 12, 2025
“Who killed school reform?” asks Alexander Russo on The Grade. Steven joins Alexander for a wide-ranging and candid conversation on how we got to this moment—and where from here.
May 12, 2025
“Social justice” education has been harming the children it needs to help, but cutting off funds to schools is not the answer. Trump’s new prohibitions, Steven argues, could prove as harmful as the misguided campaigns they were meant to arrest.
The 74 Million
April 24, 2025
Steven speaks out against the Trump administration’s threats to cut federal funding to schools and districts that engage in “illegal” DEI. Illiberalism on the Left should not be met by illiberalism on the Right.
April 25, 2025
New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante is in conversation with Steven on the harms of social justice education, the urgency of extending a rich liberal art education to all students, and the misguided attempt by the Trump administration to ban “DEI.”
March 19, 2025
Steven joins Mike Petrilli to discuss his new book The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America, which argues that the push for so-called antiracist education derailed reform and harmed marginalized students.
March 24, 2025
Host Paul Paul E. Peterson, Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard, unpacks with Steven how once-thriving urban charter schools sailed into troubled waters.
Apri 15, 2025
In this episode of "The Federalist Radio Hour," Steven joins Federalist Senior Elections Correspondent Matt Kittle to discuss the sate of the American education system.