Steven Wilson

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT STEVEN WILSON

My new book, The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America, has just been published. Find it at Amazon and thelostdecade.org!Social justice education, I argue, is harming the very students it aims to help—marginalized students from low-income communities—and leaving them less educated, more excluded, and more vulnerable. If we are at last to build a just and inclusive society, we must afford every child the education long granted the privileged: an expansive liberal arts education.I founded and ran Ascend Learning, a network of tuition-free, liberal arts charter schools in Central Brooklyn. Ascend demonstrated the power of a warm and joyful school culture focused on fostering student agency—and not only closed but reversed longstanding achievement gaps.To offer vibrant instruction virtually in the time of the pandemic, I cofounded the National Summer School Initiative—and developed a new model for accelerating learning and building teacher capacity. My first book, Reinventing the Schools: A Radical Plan for Boston, drove the development and passage of the Massachusetts charter school law.