Paul Peterson: The tentative title for the upcoming book is: lost 10 years. We closed the school for a year or two. Why do we call it the ‘lost decade’?
Stephen Wilson: I would like to point out a change in direction pursued by schools participating in the reform movement. For a long time, a central point of city charters under the KIPP framework has been to do whatever is necessary to improve student achievement. Because there is no panacea for increasing achievement, the idea was to pay attention to what we call the 101% solution. Internally, the test for every decision in a network or school was, “Will this improve student achievement?”
But now that has really changed. Because what I call social justice education is starting to replace the focus on academic education. The new test for decisions is to make them as anti-racist as possible. So in the biggest sense, academia is becoming less focused and the new focus is on social justice.
You said everything was done with student achievement in mind. What have you done to maximize student learning at Ascend Learning and other schools like it?
The key is an operating system that is much more advantageous for student achievement than district schools. The operating system is a charter transaction. When you start a charter school, you have a degree of power and autonomy to do the things that really matter: hire and fire the faculty you want, choose the curriculum that best suits you, and control your budget. Principals in traditional, large urban schools have relatively little control. The charter deal was a fundamental change in the operating system that allows us to build great schools.
But effective programs are needed. It was a much more rigorous curriculum, tremendous attention to who was in the classroom, heavy investment in teacher professional development, some degree of internal accountability, frequent assessments, and a firm conviction that testing was important and important. A guide to whether students are actually learning.
Starting with KIPP, these schools focus on creating orderly, engaging classrooms that help students achieve academic success little by little each semester. And these small successes not only add up academically, but also in terms of the student's motivation and commitment to the learning project. They were some of the big drivers.
Given the success stories, why are changes unfolding in this very area? Is it being forced by some kind of external pressure, or is it coming from within the charter sector?
No, it doesn’t come from within as much as a new hire. Back in 2008, when Teach for America was at its peak of popularity, 11% of Yale graduates applied. Teach for America was seen as a very sexy and exciting activity. Well, that has changed. It began with a change in campus culture away from a liberal arts education. A new progressive left has emerged, wary of traditional commitments to the humanities. The idea is to expose students to multiple competing perspectives, allowing them to confront each other with different ideas.
The focus is now on eradicating racial discrimination, which has been identified as the cause of the educational achievement gap. That's a very different premise. From the previous premise, the cause of the gap that everyone deplores and finds intolerable is their low level of education. The new theory was that the cause of the gap was racism. Of course, this was intensified by the killing of George Floyd and racism, and the ideas of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo gained tremendous power both on campus and in networks. And these ideas are in very considerable tension with the traditional promise of innocence schooling.
The racist dimension is said to have included things we consider absolutely normal, if not admirable: notions of excellence, urgency, and objectivity. All of these things were now seen as symptoms of white supremacist culture.
I am aware of this argument, and I know it is clearly expressed on college campuses. But how does it penetrate charter schools?
It penetrates very deeply. Lists of assumed characteristics of white supremacist culture are being circulated not only at elite institutions of higher learning like Harvard, but also at community colleges. In New York City, educators received just that same training. So it's very widespread. And you can imagine that introducing this into this kind of network of good schools would have generated a huge amount of hostility. Because long-serving faculty did not consider themselves racist. They achieved amazing results in their classrooms and in the schools they ran as principals, but suddenly they were being accused of being, in fact, racists.
I want to be careful. Equity is a very good thing. But that's exactly what I thought we were all doing. We were advancing equity by providing children with an outstanding education. And the results were amazing. KIPP students who attended both KIPP middle schools and KIPP high schools had nearly the same four-year college graduation rates as white students in general. It's a truly amazing record.
Is there actually any evidence that these schools aren't very effective? Is there anything to suggest that this is so detrimental in terms of student achievement?
What we are starting to see anecdotally is that very good, unapologetic schools are beginning to end up plummeting, often to the level of their surrounding districts. “Well, it’s closed. There was Covid.” So why did they fall so much further than competing school systems? Both institutions have suffered from school closures and other pandemic impacts.
Let's look into the future. You say the tentative title of your book is “Returning to the Fight for School Reform.” A comeback sounds optimistic. Does this mean we can come back?
yes. It will take time to focus on academic excellence. Many people of all kinds of ideological stripes began to question what had happened. It could be said that all children, not just the privileged, deserve a very engaging liberal arts education that grapples with different ideas, competing ideas, and different cultures. This is the most stimulating place you can be. That's the classroom you want to be in. We can absolutely go back to those classrooms. And I think that's exactly what we need to do.