IT ISN’T ANTI-RACIST; IT’S PRO-DEPENDENCY: How ‘anti-racist’ ideology hurt the students it was supposed to help.

In 2019, students at Ascend’s 15 charter schools — nearly all of them living in poverty — were “reading Shakespeare in the middle grades, studying the Dutch masters, and outperforming city and statewide averages on standardized tests,” writes Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times. Then, founder Steven F. Wilson came out for high expectations in a an essay titled The Promise of Intellectual Joy, and was fired for “white supremacist rhetoric.”

Wilson is back in the fray with a book titled The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America. He tells Bellafante that anti-racist education failed students. At one school that went anti-racist, “the percentage of students meeting or exceeding standards on the math section of the SAT plummeted from 41 percent in 2017 to 4 percent in 2024,” he says.

Anti-racist programming failed, says Wilson, because “indoctrination is boring.”

It also isn’t educating — and isn’t meant to be.