The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America

by Steven F. Wilson

Description

"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 show more 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"-- show less