Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle's senior elections correspondent at The
Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Stephen Wilson, pioneer Institute scolar and
former Charters school head. We talk about his new book,
The Lost Decade, Returning to the Fight for better schools
in America. In it, he talks about how social justice
and trauma informed teaching are tanking test scores and damaging
students development. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us
on this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: It's a real pleasure to be with you.
Speaker 1: Thank you absolutely. This book just recently published, correct, Yeah,
just two weeks ago. So there's nothing that I enjoy
more than fresh pages in a book, and here we are.
In it, you argue that social justice education. We've heard
all about social justice over the last several years. In
this country from the far left, in particular social justice education.
The decades de facto K twelve school reform strategy is
harming the very students it aims to help. Let us
begin there, because that really is at the cornerstone of
your argument in many ways, where we stand in America.
Speaker 3: That's precisely the case that I try to make, which
is that efforts which began with a noble and urgent purpose,
which is to address the achievement gaps that we all
to cry on both the left, center and the right,
that these particular efforts are having the reverse effect. That is,
they are leaving students who are ready marginalized still further behind.
So rather than bringing them into American life and equipping
them for success, they are excluding them. It's really not
a very complicated argument, really when you think about it,
because if we are denying students a vigorous, rich, exciting
academic education, we are really consigning them to exclusion and
to poverty.
Speaker 1: And we have seen the impacts of that. How much
more has the COVID era, or did the COVID era
lend to all of this? We saw, as you noted
in your book, an advancement on this front in the
early part of this century some real movement, and I
think that has everything to do with there at least
much to do with school choice, expanding and opening charter
schools and voucher systems in all kinds of different ways
to break away from the standard public education system and
so much failure that we've seen over the last several
decades in the country in that system. But how much
did COVID play into this when you think about the
isolation and what has been called the lost year plus
in education.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, I love the way you set that up,
and there's so much rich richness in your question that
I hope we can dive into. But essentially what I
would bring attention to is Yes, in the first two
decades of the new century, we had what has been
widely recognized on both the left and the right.
Speaker 2: Stanford in.
Speaker 3: Credo their agency that examines a charter school effectiveness the
most rigorous studies of charter school effectiveness in the country,
and also at Brookings reaching the same conclusion that urban
charter schools, and specifically an approach to urban charters called
no Excuses much misunderstood. Hope we can get into that
as well. A post in simply astonishing results where these
schools were able to not only close achievement gaps, but
actually begin to reverse them. So, for example, at the
best known network KIP, the Knowledge Is Power program, if
you attend, according to a recent study, if you attend
both a KIP Middle school and a KIP High school,
you are now in a situation where your likelihood of
not just enrolling in college completing it is as great
as a white student from an affluent background. So a
black student attending those two schools, black student from poverty
has as good a chance of completing college after a
number of years. So really a remarkable achievement. And that's
just one measure of success, but there are so many.
So in two thousand and twenty, however, after the murder
of George Floyd, the racial reckoning could have led us
to double down on the successful approach and to dramatically
expand it in the name of equity and inclusion. Instead,
we turned away from it. Many of these schools adopted
a program of anti racism. I would like to figuratively
capitalize that term, because we're all anti racist, but of
anti racism, which meant that they would engage kind of
a twofold dimension two fold approach, where both a program
of therapy where students were assumed to have suffered trauma
growing up in America in what was presumed to be
a racist country, and secondly, a program of political recruitment,
if you will, into a particular ideology. And this took
away from this single minded focus on academic excellence that
had been the north star of these very successful organizations.
So places like the Noble Schools in Chicago, which you
may be familiar with, which were simply killing it. They
occupied some of the many of the top slots of
Chicago's high schools. This is a network of urban charter
high schools, places like Boston Collegiate, one of the high performing,
super high performing Boston charters, places like Achievement First, the
network of superb charters in New York City just saw
the results really collapse as a result of this change
in purpose and method. And this is what I write
about in the book. So results tumbled. They ended up
being in many cases at the beginning they were eighty
percent of students were on grade level on Tractor College,
ninety percent even higher. And now they were performing below
the failed districts in which they were located. That's what
I wanted to bring attention to because I want to
create a drive to restore the excellence in these schools
and to expand it to hundreds of thousands of more
students across the country.
Speaker 1: Steven, this is the burning question that I have because
I've seen so much failure. I've reported on so much
failure in our school systems across the country. When you're
dealing with the critical race theory, the anti racism, all
of this dogma teaching on the left, and you see
the full spectrum of DEI that is the umbrella under
which all of this exists, diversity, equity and inclusion. The
burning question I have is why did these schools open
the door to this?
Speaker 2: And yes, I can explain that something.
Speaker 1: But further yes, and if you would expound on are
they closing the door? Are they kicking this stuff out?
In understanding now that that was an abject failure.
Speaker 3: Let's take that each part of time. By the way,
such wonderful, rich questions. I do want to begin by
saying that I'm in favor after diversity, equity, inclusion, but
not of the particular methods that were used. I mean, look,
we live in a diverse country, we live in a
nation of immigrants. We want everyone to feel included and
to feel that they are empowered and equipped for success.
That's what I think of inclusion as meaning. And certainly
want fairness. We all want a fair society where everyone
has an equal chance. But I do not think that
the particular method of DEI has been successful, and you
alluded to components of it. Informing students that the world
has rigged against them is not a successful path for
building engagement in schooling, a sense of optimism and purpose
and agency. So that the reason to your question of
what caused the turnarway, it's really about a new generation
of aspiring teachers coming out of colleges and universities, particularly
ones that we would call elite colleges and universities who
were culturated there in college with very different set of
beliefs than new teachers simply a decade before. So, if
you recall in two thousand and eight we had the
movie Waiting for Superman, we had a tremendous and by
the way, bipartisan enthusiasm for charters and particularly urban charters
for Teach for America, where a lot of these teachers
into charters were coming from and they.
Speaker 2: Shared a passion.
Speaker 3: Whether it be white teachers, black teachers, brown teachers, everybody
wanted to do whatever it takes to educate students to
a high level. So there's passion for great teaching. But
in the first part, in the early part of the
twenty twenties, we saw a real turn away from that.
So graduates of college universities were arriving to charters with
a very different set of commitments, very anti intellectual commitments.
By the way, they didn't their passion was not for
great teaching. Their passion was for critical pedagogy, for racial sentialism,
for the ideas in particular of Ibram Kendy and Robin DiAngelo,
who were very widely read at that time. Of course,
Robin DiAngelo and also derivative scholars like Tima Oakum, who
you may recall, was the one who identified what she
described as the as the characteristics or symptoms of white
supremacist culture. And she included in that list of eleven
or twelve items objectivity and worship of the written words.
So just imagine telling teachers of black and brown students
that worship of the written word is whiteness. What does
that tell to those students? It tells them that great
literature is something that doesn't pertain to you, that's part
of oppressive white culture. I mean, it's really I'm sorry,
it's a really deranged message.
Speaker 2: If you were if you.
Speaker 4: Were a.
Speaker 3: Mad scientist going into the lab trying to concoct something
that would most hurt students, you might turn to that
kind of message. Similarly, describing objectivity as whiteness is also
a very dangerous message. Punctuality would be another one. So
Tima Oakum's document The Explicit inexplicably was used in almost
all these trainings, including in twenty nineteen a required training
for all New York City educators in the district where
they were schooled, that these were things to basically look
out for as being part of quote white supremacy, even
of course white supremacy culture. Even that is a horrific
borrowing of a term that in the common mind refers
to the klu klux Klan right and overt racist. So
to say there was provocative is a massive understatement. And
what happened is that a lot of really great people
just left these schools because I thought this was absurd
and or worse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can certainly understand that because it is the
value of ignorance. It's putting a value, a greater value
on ignorance. I mean, there is the expression that perhaps
is overused, but I think it fits here. It's the
you know, it's the soft bigotry of low expectation that
seems to me to be whether they want that to
be or not, these so called experts in education. That
seems to be at the core and the big reason
why we've seen some much failure.
Speaker 2: Right. And by the way, this notion that you bring up,
which is so important.
Speaker 3: Of the soft bigotry of low expectations, is precisely right.
And it's also it's not just an ideological supposition, it's
a proven fact.
Speaker 2: If you go into.
Speaker 3: Schools and you look at what is being placed before students,
what is expected of them, what learning tasks are they
being assigned, you will find that they're consistently being assigned
tasks that underestimate horrifically what they're capable of. Students are
being given assignments and material that is one or two
grade levels below them and what they could reasonably grapple with,
and so that's low expectations in living color. And this
is the foremost problem in American education, which is underestimating
students and what they're capable of learning doing. And then
you add to that this very anti intellectual element of
dismissing a vast swath of the curriculum as Western oppressive knowledge,
and you have a formula for a disaster. The other
element that's very important in this is that these highly
successful so called no excuses schools were called no excuses
not because they would not be accommodating of children being children,
not because they were going to weigh along kids for
bad behavior, but rather it meant the solemn pledge of teachers,
of the adults in the building to stop making excuses,
to stop blaming inadequate resources, poverty, racism. Those are all
very real things and we need to tackle all of them.
But that is not an obstacle to achieving success sas
with every child. So we said within these new schools,
we said, within these four walls, we have everything it
takes to succeed. That's an amazing proposition, and these schools
turned away from that by saying no o contreire. Racism
is the biggest problem until we uh, until we eliminate racism,
we can't really be expected to succeed with children. So
in fact, not only did they break the solemn pledge
of not making excuses, but they adopted the ultimate, everlasting,
inexhaustible excuse, which is, so long as racism remains prevalent
in American life, we can't succeed with with our students.
That was that was in effect the message, and and
and then and then in turn, what happened is that
they began by saying, we must first address our own
trauma as teachers in education, and once we've that and
done that, then we will turn to the trauma of
our students. And only when we have encountered and engaged
that will we turned back to rigorous teaching. And that's
a very long path away, and that's why the results collapsed.
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Speaker 1: So much to unpack there. It's horrifying. It really is
what we've experienced over the last several years in this country,
and I want to delve into that further. Our guests
today is Stephen Wilson, pioneer Institute scholar, former charter school head.
We're talking about his new book, The Lost Decade, returning
to the fight for better schools in America, and it
is just that it is a fight, and it is
such an important fight. But I just want to go
back to what you mentioned before about the death of
objectivity in this style of teaching, in the style of
apparently trying to reach students turns out to me to
be nothing more than a method for indoctrination. And what
you talked about is a long term, long term failure.
It also seems to me to be a successful movement
for the big teacher unions in this country. It's job security.
But first, how did we get to a point where
we have education experts again so called saying that one
plus one doesn't have to equal two. That is, I mean,
that has been the joke around this argument, but that
really is true. There are people teaching that, that is,
it is racist to expect one plus one to equal
two in communities of color, as they say.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it arose I would bring our attention to
two moments.
Speaker 2: One is.
Speaker 3: In the nineteen sixties, the Brazilian educator Paulo Frera gained
wide influence with a particular book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
which she first lectured at the part of Graduate School
of Education and became immensely popular. It dovetailed with, of course,
radical movements on campus and sentiments of that period, but
basically it argued a very seductive way that American schools
or schools more generally, were engaging in what he called
a banking theory of education. They were making deposits of quote,
oppressor knowledge in students and basically fattening them into meek
and submissive citizens who would do the bidding of capitalist exploiters.
And this was very, as I said, very attractive message
for a lot of people, and remain so today it's
among the most assigned. There's a study on this that
looked at what are people reading in schools and colleges
of education and this was among the top techs. So
still today it is the viewpoint that is advanced in
schools of education. And you make an extremely important point,
one that I emphasize a lot, which is, these are schools.
These are places that are supposed to venerate intellectual achievement,
These places that are supposed to get kids excited about
their intellectual inheritance from all cultures at all times. That's
our gift to them, but we're apparently intent on denying
it to them. The other strand, which of course is related,
is the rise of postmodernism, which was also which now
dominates the humanities and increasingly the natural sciences at colleges
and universities, which has a epistemological claim that there is
no such thing as objectivity. Objectivity is simply a tool
or a weapon of the oppressor. This arises from the
claims of Michelle Fucot, among others, and that the oppressed
have another way of seeing the world, and in fact
they have a kind of dual site. They can see
through the eyes of the oppressed, and they can also
see through the eyes of their oppressed sore. So it's
a kind of claim that there is no one truth.
There is only It's called standpoint theory for those who
want to delve into it. Further, standpoint theory claims that
truth is only my truth or your truth. We shall
never meet, we shall never find common ground, because truth
is a function of identity. I of course utterly reject
that it's particularly remarkable that the natural sciences have significantly
bent in this direction, but because of course it's totally
at odds with empiricism.
Speaker 2: So there we are.
Speaker 3: So these are great influences on young teachers. They find
these ideas, as I said, very seductive, and then they
bring them to the schools that they join. And because
charter schools met rely much more significant on younger teachers
and have, for better for worse, often a significant attrition.
The jobs are very demanding that people are young, they
may go on to something else. You have a higher
turnover in these schools and more young teachers. And that's
why they adopted this ideology faster than in the majority system.
But to your point, the unions have wrapped themselves around
these claims, so they're also very pervasive in the majority system.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as you know, I think there's a clear mission
to this pedagogy and it has been going on, as
you note, for decades. The idea that this is a
rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressors is of course
laughable to me as I watched this movement, I'm sure
it is. It is equal parts laughable and sad. But
what we're seeing is the development of an indoctrination system
where instead of the idea from what they're talking about
is a knee bent at the altar of capitalism, this
is a knee bent at the altar of socialism. And
this very bizarre a series of ideas, this strategy of education,
and that is what is concerning. What is ultimately more
concerning is that in so many places we're not learning.
And let me put this in perspective. This week, Stephen,
as I talked to you, Wisconsin had a very nationally
watched Supreme Court state Supreme Court election, but there was
also another race on the state wide ballot that was
for Superintendent of Public Instruction and the people of the
state of Wisconsin. Although it's a spring election, it does
not get the kind of turnout that you would see
certainly in a presidential election, as we saw in November
in Wisconsin, pretty high turnout for a spring election given
the Supreme Court race. But the people of Wisconsin re
elected a union supported superintendent of public education who has
presided over a failure rate in the state of Wisconsin,
particularly in Milwaukee, which is abysmal, where we have single
digit proficiency ratings for kids reading and for kids being
able to solve math problems. That is inexcusable. But why
do we keep electing people who deliver these results?
Speaker 2: Well, that's a great question.
Speaker 3: And by the way, how utterly heartbreaking to hear of
single digit success rates. So that reminds me of a
district here in Rochester, a city in New York State,
where indeed the person who is in charge of curriculum
instruction has claimed great success in fighting racism despite the
fact that they remain in the single digits level of proficiency.
So I'm afraid you know, I have no answer for
you on that. How someone could be re elected or
someone could be in the case of my story, hailed
as she was as a great education visionary when it's
playing that under her watch in this case, where she
has explicit responsibility for instruction in the district and has
for a long time, when the children have not been educated,
where it's an abject fail. This is in fact very mysterious.
I think part of it in both stories is that
the Union has so successfully peddled the message that what
is wrong with American schools is not enough money, despite
the fact that we spend among the highest in the
world and have for decades, and now of course pedaled
the message that the primary problem is racism. And so
you will see, for example, the head of the Massachusetts
Teachers Association, Marin Najami, saying that the differential outcomes across
school systems in Massachusetts is not a measure of their
quality or their students preparation, but is mainly, and I
will paraphraseer an expression of quote, structural racism. So this
argument is a way of excusing their failure, invoking another
cause beyond their control.
Speaker 2: I want to be.
Speaker 3: Clear that I am not anti union, and in fact,
I think every American should have the right to unionize
that we may disagree, but I think that our country
would be stronger if more of the working class was unionized.
But putting that aside, the teachers' unions are, in their
present incarnation unquestionably an obstacle. We have Shirley and Milwaukee,
certainly in New York City, Boston, et cetera, collective barring
agreements that run three hundred pages or more that shackle
the hands of principles and being able to do anything
that any reasonable person would think that principle has to
do to create excellence, that is, to be able to
hire and fire. Takes one hundred thousand dollars to dismiss
a chronically ineffective teacher in legal fees. That's insane. So
it is a more wrong that we take the most
important institution in American life, which is the schools that
prepare the next generation, and we impose on them these
horrendous constraints that make success impossible. That's why charters are
so important, of course, which is that they free ambitious
school leaders from those constraints.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we certainly have seen that across the country. And
I speak again of Milwaukee, and you talk about three
hundred page collective bargaining agreements the state of Wisconsin for
the better part of the last fifteen years hasn't really
had to deal with that because of the Act ten
reforms in public sector collective bargaining, the teachers' unions, and
the election that I spoke of, the Wisconsin Supreme Court
election which liberals will continue to control the court. That
means that those reforms are about to go away. And
it's not only the savings that are attached to that.
People talk about that all the time. It's exactly what
you just spelled out. It's the sort of binding that
happens that blocks great education in our schools. Education, dedicated
teachers that could be reaching these students, raising these horrific
levels of proficiency lack thereof.
Speaker 3: And if I could just give actual example so our
listeners understand if they're not involved in schools, how this
plays out. So I founded and ran a network of
urban charters in New York City called a sam Learning
of fifteen schools. We were eventually, after a lot of
new steps, able to close and then reverse these achievement
gaps in some of the most challenged communities in New
York City. And we were able to do that because
organized as charter schools, we were able to write job descriptions,
we were able to pay teachers more than in the
district were able to pay more for the most difficult specialty,
say high school chemistry teachers, we were able to not
have seniority based bumping. That's a tremendous obstacle. So, just
to give an example of what that means, that if
you have a reduction in force, a prized teacher in
one school who might be might have been there for
years and achieving remarkable success, can lose her or his
job and be replaced by a gym teacher who is
more senior from a school halfway across the city. That's
complete madness. Yes, so the way that tenure actually functions,
the way that seniority based assignments actually function. If we
wanted to look at examples of structural racism, I would
say there's our exhibit A that is structural racism because
it assigns the least experienced teachers to the most need classrooms.
That is wrong, and that is the policy of the
union and has been for decades. So you can't make
any headway in those kinds of environments. And by the way,
it's not just one collective bargaining contract.
Speaker 2: You might have ten of them.
Speaker 3: That building bus the custodians and the assistant teachers, everybody
that even the principles. In many states until recently we're
their own union.
Speaker 2: So you just can't create great schools.
Speaker 3: I have a whole chapter devote to this, because, of course,
the common question is can't we fix the majority system
where most the kids are And the hard answer is
probably not, And if we wanted to, the best way
to do it would be to introduce competition. Even a
little bit of competition. Research is showing puts the majority
district schools on their toes and compels them to get better.
Speaker 1: Well, we spend a lot of time, understandably toiling in
the garden of disappointment, frustration, and just the pain of
watching these broken systems. But your book does spell out
the way forward. And I guess the question before I
get there is you have, you know, a defined look
at how to improve these schools. You've experienced it, you've
done that. But why for so many decades have we
made our children lab rats as we try to figure
out you know, different ways in generally you know, leftist
directed ways on how to fix our kids, so to speak.
Speaker 3: Well, I think there are a couple of dimensions to
that one is that teachers.
Speaker 2: Are deeply caring people. They are.
Speaker 3: What we call a helping profession, right like nurses, and
they want to they want to help children, and they
are naturally inclined towards caring. And the problem is is
that if you see your job to be to comfort
students rather than to challenge them, you're going to have
You're going to create a very bad outcome for them.
So part of it is who the profession attracts. And
I don't say that with any sense of criticism or accusation.
You really need leaders in American education at the school level,
at the state level, even at the federal level, who say, no,
high standards, high expectations is not a lack of caring.
It's the ultimate expression of caring, because we carry for
you to ask more of you. And you know, we
know this from our own lives. Who are the teachers
that we remember, meant from our own schools. They aren't
the ones who didn't expect anything from us. They aren't
the ones who soothed us and said, oh, you don't
have to do your homework and oh that papers and
a when you damn well know it isn't. They're the
ones who expected more of you, who pushed you harder,
who thought of you as someone who could give more
than you were giving. Those are the ones that we
revere as adults.
Speaker 1: Missus Verity, Missus Verity, you just described Missus Verity, my
seventh grade English teacher, right there, you go.
Speaker 3: Yes, and I remember mine too, very well, exactly right.
I can name two or three who were like that.
They live with me in my mind for the rest
of my life. So this is a very important part
of why we've come to this place. The other thing
is that, frankly, America has extraordinary strengths, but anti intellectualism
has been a harmful strength and in American life really
from the very beginning. And so it's been a nation that,
and this is good, has prided itself on industry, on
practical knowledge, but always been a little bit suspicious of
academic learning if you go back to colonial times, as
being a remnant of European elites, and so this has
been this has hampered us. And then the democratization of
education has often meant sorting students prematurely into those who
were capable of rigorous academics and everybody else kind of
got either career preparation, by the way, not job preparation,
not very successfully, or just a dumbed down curriculum. So
we've been living with this dumbed down version of education
in this country for a long time. It's really baked
into the culture. We need to get away from it.
But turn to turn to the positive, which you've been
I didn't need to do. I do want to say
that we have these extraordinary examples of not just individual schools,
but networks of schools that are just producing extraordinary results.
And the kinds of problems I'm describing with social justice
education are not universal. There are many parts of the
country that are much less affected by this. We have
fantastic networks, say in Texas, like Great Hearts Academy, we
have the Basis schools. We have many places that are
getting exceptional results that did not make this turn away,
and we should be talking about them all the time
and everybody, because that's the future of excellence.
Speaker 2: We should be.
Speaker 3: Providing all students with a rich, liberal arts education. That's
what the affluent have always benefited from. You know, it's
stultifying to tell teachers to tell students what to think
and to indoctrinate them in a particular view. Of course
they should be exposed to Marxist ideas. Of course they
should be exposed to claims of all kinds. But let
them wrestle with these competing ideas. That's what creates electricity
in the classroom. Let them come to their own conclusions.
That's how we would really respect them. You know, I
think that we we mock students when we claim to
empower them, but we fail them to tea. We fail
to teach them to reason, to analyze, to express themselves
in speech and speech and writing. Those are the real
tools of power, and that's what we need to grant students,
all students.
Speaker 1: I appreciate your time today, You've been very generous with it.
But just back to a point real quick before we
close today. You talked about some of these things that
are built into the pursuit of what the ultimate goal is.
And one of those obstacles, as you noted, is this
American Trust for Higher Education. And you can understand these
days why it is there. Everything we talked about has
so much to do with these indoctrinating institutions that have
brought us this, that have taught our teachers this, our
teachers teaching our children this. How do you break that cycle?
Because until you do that, in my estimation, I don't
know if you can really attack the problems at their
fundamental level.
Speaker 3: Yes, I think that a big part of the problem
here has been the fecklessness of university leaders in allowing
an illiberal culture to take hold on their campus, where
students were not exposed to a variety of viewpoints. They
were not heterodox institutions and students and of course professors
were canceled for views that violated the orthodoxy. I think
the good news is that is breaking and we are
seeing a recognition, although it's just beginning that this was
very much a wrong turn. So step one is to
restore viewpoint diversity on campus so that teachers are acculturated
in a far more generous conception where they are curious
about ideas other than one point of view, where they
want to understand people who disagree with them, where they
want to test out arguments of all kinds. That's what
a great education is. I think we need to restore
that to your point first, and then that's going to
enable a much greater selce sas at the K twelve level,
very good.
Speaker 1: We need that success desperately, now more than ever, because
our children, our future depends on that success. Thanks to
my guest today, Stephen Wilson, Pioneer Institute scholar and former
charter school head, as we talk about his new book,
The Lost Decade, returning to the fight for better schools
in America. You've been listening to another edition of The
Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at
the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then,
stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the frame