Book finds that marginalized students suffer most from turn away from academics
BOSTON, MA / ACCESS Newswire / March 12, 2025 / Five years into the rise of so-called social justice education, it is leaving the students it aims to help less educated, more vulnerable and more marginalized, according to a new book published by Pioneer Institute.
"Inundating marginalized students with messages about their oppression and supposed incapacity has been deeply harmful," said Steven F. Wilson, author of The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America. "We should instead work to provide all public-school students with the rich liberal arts education that has long been afforded to the privileged."
The power of a liberal arts education, high expectations, safe and orderly classrooms, and relentless attention to great teaching is proven. A Stanford University study found that in New York City, "no excuses" schools operated by charter management organizations that embodied this approach generated an additional 110 days of learning in reading and 124 days in math in a single year.
It was also clear that the schools can narrow or eliminate achievement gaps at scale. Nationwide, these "gap-closing" schools were adding around 50,000 students-the size of the Boston public school district-each year.
In Massachusetts, the framers of the 1993 Education Reform Act-William Weld, Thomas Birmingham, and Mark Roosevelt-all shared a profound formative experience: an outstanding liberal arts education. Extending the opportunity they were afforded to all students was at the heart of the reform they crafted, and the Commonwealth's public schools soon became the finest in the country and competitive with the best in the world.
Urban charter public schools in Massachusetts also recorded spectacular academic gains. According to a Brookings Institution report, "the test score gains produced by Boston charters are some of the largest that have ever been documented for an at-scale educational intervention."
The racial reckoning
The racial reckoning that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer could have spurred on the transformation of urban schooling that charter schools sparked. It could have assailed big-city systems' chronically low expectations of students. The catastrophic learnings losses from the pandemic could have lit a fire under districts to accelerate instruction and urgently make up lost academic ground.
They did nothing of the sort. Instead, they fueled what Wilson terms the Political and Therapeutic Evasions-the substitution of social justice training for academics, the provision of therapy in place of instruction. Academic achievement-rarely venerated in American schools to begin with-was demoted, if not scorned.
A new "social justice" approach to education newly pervades America's urban schools. It holds that objectivity and urgency are symptoms of toxic white supremacy culture, that truth is a phantasm and liberal education is elitist and colonialist. Before teaching academics, school justice educators claim, schools must address the trauma teachers and students experience from living in a white supremacist society.
"The result of seeking to 'heal' and politically 'awaken' staff and students before teaching academic content creates yet another excuse for failure," said Director of Pioneer Education Jamie Gass.
Even many gap-busting urban schools adopted this approach. In one of them, Boston Collegiate Charter School, the percentage of grade 8 students scoring proficient or advanced in English language arts (ELA) tumbled from 22 points higher than their Boston Public Schools counterparts in 2019 to nine points below that of the Boston Public Schools in 2024.
Two New York City charter networks, Success Academies and Classical Charter Schools, resisted social justice education. In the spring of 2024, 95 percent or more of students in both networks were proficient in math and 82 percent in ELA.
After Success, the four next largest New York City charter networks embraced, to varying degrees, social justice education. By 2024, students in their schools saw their proficiency advantage over the New York City Public Schools shrink by two thirds. By 2024, students in networks that pivoted the hardest to Antiracism were scarcely more likely to be found proficient in ELA than district school students.
"Literacy and numeracy are the keys to upward mobility," said Pioneer Executive Director Jim Stergios. "The movement to bring about justice by watering down curricula has clearly failed."
At the mid-point of the decade, it is time to choose another path.
"We can equip all children with a rigorous and engaging liberal arts education that arouses curiosity, venerates knowledge, cultivates compassion, and upholds reason, Wilson said. We can return to creating a new generation of schools that lift achievement for all students and build a more equitable and just society."
###
About Steven F. Wilson
Steven F. Wilson is a senior fellow at Pioneer Institute. An education entrepreneur, policymaker, and writer, Wilson founded and built Ascend Learning, a network of fifteen tuition-free, liberal arts charter schools in Central Brooklyn. The Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University identified Ascend as a "gap-busting" network for its success in closing-and reversing-achievement gaps of race and income. His most recent venture, the National Summer School Initiative, provides accelerated instruction in the wake of the pandemic to 150,000 urban students. His first book, Reinventing the Schools: A Radical Plan for Boston, drove the development and passage of the Massachusetts charter school law. Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools won the Virginia and Warren Stone prize for an outstanding book on education and society. His new book, The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America, will be published by Pioneer in March.
About Pioneer Institute
Pioneer empowers Americans with choices and opportunities to live freely and thrive. Working with state policymakers, we use expert research, educational initiatives, legal action and coalition-building to advance human potential in four critical areas: K-12 Education, Health, Economic Opportunity, and American Civic Values.
Media Contact
Amy Martin
amy@keybridge.biz
(202) 988-3222
SOURCE: Pioneer Institute
View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire
