Recorded live at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ annual conference in Orlando, this special episode of WonkyFolk features a candid and thought-provoking interview with education leader and author Steven Wilson. Hosts Andy Rotherham and Jed Wallace sit down with Steven to unpack his latest book, The Lost Decade, and explore what it means for the future of education reform.

In their signature style—honest, informed, and unafraid of disagreement—Andy and Jed also share reflections from the conference floor and dig into the hard questions facing the charter movement today. It’s a conversation rich with insight, nuance, and vision for what comes next.

🎙️ In This Episode:

• Steven Wilson breaks down the themes of The Lost Decade

• Reflections on leadership, accountability, and innovation in schools

• Why reform feels stuck—and what might move it forward

• Conference takeaways and real-time reactions from the field

• A few lively disagreements between Jed and Andy (naturally!)

This is an essential listen for anyone working in or thinking about public education today.

Watch it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxLaJmygER8

Hello, Jed.

Hey, Andy. How you doing?

Good. It's good to see you get to do another one of these in person.

Yeah. In Florida, you know, not at a.

Bar, but in Florida.

It sounds like a bar.

It does sound like a bar. Because we're at the national alliance for Public Charter Schools annual conference. And it is kind of an interesting sign of the times.

I was walking through the exhibit hall, which is near where we're doing the podcast, and it reminded me of one of the big old line education conferences back in the day. Just the size of the exhibit hall, the volume, the number of vendors and different kinds of products and services for schools.

And it's a charter school conference. And you probably wouldn't have predicted that 20 years ago that this is actually bigger than some of the old line education conferences now.

Yeah, real sense of energy. It's really cool. And nice job moderating the panel this morning. You need to thank. Fantastic job.

We will, you know, just remind people out of the gate. This is the Wonky Folk podcast with, with Andy Rothram and Jed Wallace.

And today we are lucky that we've got Stephen Wilson, who has an amazing background in charter schools for a long time and has written a book, the Lost Decade, which is going to serve as the frame for a lot of our conversation today. Thanks for writing this book and thanks for being a part of this conversation today.

Delighted to be with you both. Good to see you guys.

Yeah, I was just thinking back.

I remember you and I doing a consultancy discussion together that was right when we were in a moment of like, I think, big momentum and a sense of optimism and all that stuff. And so I hope we can dive back into that.

It's like, you know, just remembering that moment when the charter school world really felt on stride and we can get back there. Do you want to get us started with our first question or something?

Well, why don't we start? This is a question this morning I did.

The keynote discussion was with Marlon from the Citi Fund and Nello from DSST in Colorado and Hannah from Daniels.

And I asked them like, scale 1 to 10 with 1 being absolute pessimism and 10 being total optimism, like where they were on charters and charter schooling. So I'll ask you the same question, one to 10, Stephen, like, where are you today?

I would say I'm a five, I'm a die hard optimist, but I have a of lot, a lot of worry right now. I think we've lost our focus on instruction, on great teaching, and on academic achievement as the North Star as the raison d'. Etre.

And I'm very worried about a scenario which we sink toward the mean and we revert to the mean. Our results are not sufficiently distinguished from the majority system.

And at the same time, a lot of energy goes towards private school choice, ESAs and vouchers, and the charter movement is forgotten. Now, that's a dire scenario, but it's one that we should be alert to. I think there's another word. Oh, is that. I want to hear more.

Jed and I have a disagreement about this.

Yeah, I'm so curious to hear more.

But of course, there's another scenario in which we bring the sector's traditional humility, drive assertion, and we say, okay, we made a wrong turn, but we can fix it. We're at mid decade, let's get to it. I just don't know which way we'll go.

When you say you're at five, is that. Is that your nadir?

Is that as low as it's been and it stayed there, or if you had moments where you felt even lower and there's no kind of rebound whatsoever?

This is a low point. Yes.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

And.

And if you were to broaden the analysis out to where public education is right now, with the implosion after Covid with NAEP scores and the other problems that are out there, what would be your optimism assessment for public education?

How low does the scale go?

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, because it puts in context, hey, five, let's say a two.

And there's a reason for that, which is that the response to the pandemic was very revealing about the majority system. We saw no sense of urgency.

And you have to remember, right, the basics were schools closed in March, mid March, and there was very little return or effort to go towards live teaching. Some kids got none at all. You know, the whole story. And then there was big talk about making up learning gaps in lost ground.

It was going to be extensive, high dosage tutoring, to use Mike Goldstein's term, et cetera, et cetera. None of those initiatives came to pass.

So it really revealed how complacent the majority system is and how impossible it is for them to get out of their own way. So I'm not optimistic about the majority system.

One of the things I love about the book is the first three chapters.

And I bet you we would look at the Massachusetts story as very aligned with that overall NAEP story.

How do you, how are you characterizing kind of, you know, our historical efforts and you know, how are you putting, you know, the NAEP story and the other dysfunction in context of that broader history?

And since then, and that idea was abandoned, just to be clear.

And since then we've had a long and sorry procession of anti intellectual reforms that were always advanced in the name of democratizing education, but in fact had the reverse effect, dumbing down education, depriving most students of a rigorous education that as I said, the rich have always obtained.

And my book argues that this latest turn of social justice education is merely the latest installment in that procession of anti academic progress reforms. So I think that this is important context.

Of course, the brief exception was the educational excellence movement, beginning with the bombshell of the nation at risk and culminating in the federalization of the initiatives across the states to establish education standards and accountability.

And I think that a fair reading of that is that we did make some progress, as you said, in the first decade and then we did not sustain it in the second. And people gave up on it, but for the wrong reasons and without the care. They didn't take it apart. They didn't realize how we could fix it.

And so I think we've largely lost that as well. The accountability movement.

Yeah, well, I mean last.

And that's of course very dangerous, Jed, for charters. Right.

Because if we don't have the spotlight on performance, schools will revert, including charters, to defining all kinds of other ends for education other than academic excellence. And I think that's what's happening now.

And the charter movement early was centered around that idea. Absolutely, excellence.

And you know, Matt Candler, famous at famously, I don't want to be part of a movement that, that his motto is we're just going to suck less.

Yes.

And it was like this, this what you're talking about with sort of the standards movement, Is focus on excellence really was the breeding ground for this first generation of charters that were, you know, just relentlessly focused on outcomes and getting kids.

And that was a bombshell. He's absolutely right. And now I think we're back in that moment that we need to restore the focus on academic outcomes for kids.

We're doing kids no favor by sending them to schools that are only incrementally better than the schools around them.

I'm known for insufferably long charterfolk posts.

I think the longest one I've written in, like, in five years of doing this was at last year's conference when I used the Boston story and I just told the history and I want to see that.

Basically the supreme court pulling back from Brown versus Boards separating out the suburban schools from D SEG in Boston and basically how there's been no progress made on reform in Boston schools forever until the charter school movement comes along.

Yes.

And please can we.

Can we remember that the brookings institution, liberal lion of the think tanks, says the largest educational effects ever seen in the Boston charter schools. So absolutely. And by the way, that has unraveled. And we could talk about that too.

And let's. We should talk about that because, I mean, that's the fascinating thing and not a really flattering sort of portrait for the sector.

When you say that they're outperforming. We should quite quantify this.

It was, you know, 180 extra days of learning where the effect sizes, which is basically we talk about extended learning time or extending the school year. They're basically doubling the school year.

Kids there in the charters were getting 2 for 1 in terms of the amount of instruction that they were getting.

And you would think in a situation like that that everybody around the country would descend on Boston to figure out, like, what's going on and that local leaders would be highlighting that. You think of so many other things if you had a cure for a disease or whatever else people would be clocking.

And yet, like, not Only did it get no, you know, not a lot of attention outside of places like Brookings. Like, it is faded.

It is more than faded. What. What I think people need to understand is that many of those high flying schools are no longer once. And there's a specific dynamic to this.

And they just said, screw this. I don't know if I'm allowed to use more colorful language on your show.

You are on Walking Folk. Anything goes.

I'm out of here. And then what happened is that the successor leader. We all know how insanely fragile schools are to their leadership, right?

And the successor leaders were either people who were true believers in social justice education and totally changed direction, the results tanked, or they were just looking for comity. They just wanted everyone to get along again. They fared no better.

Right.

Because you have to stand for something and you have to resolve this is a fundamental conflict over direction. Or in a very small number of cases, those leaders held firm and stayed. Like the Brooks schools. The Brooks schools continue to just kill the sector.

They are fantastic because they never let this in the door. They said, we are all about rigorous, rich academics for every child. That's what caring and that's what justice looks like.

One of the things that struck me about this, Stephen, I'm interested in, you have experience here. You were leading a school at this time. You have experience with this dynamic. It struck me as a very elite discourse.

When you went into communities and you talked to parents, these were not things they were talking about. They liked schools that were orderly in schools that were safe. They liked the focus on academics.

They thought getting their kids ready for college was why they had chosen these schools in the first place. Not that it was a system of oppression. They wanted schools are going to propel their kids into college.

And so it struck me it was a very sort of elite discourse where it was being done in the name of communities, but it was really education reformers talking to other education reformers.

Yes. And this is a point I wish I had made this morning with the network talk. This is exactly right.

And of course, one crude measure of that is the parent surveys, which at all These networks were 95%, 97% approval of what their, their children were getting. Yes, this was always an elite imposition. Parents of these schools, as you said, I couldn't say it better, always wanted rigorous academics.

They always wanted a chance to get their kids into college. And they knew that that would take a lot of hard work. So the KIPP slogan, be nice, work hard, that was correct to them.

And by the way, it doesn't just start. This elite discourse doesn't just start there.

I mean, if we go way back into the early 19th century, we have the same thing in the south where black parents after the end of slavery were very clear that they want an academically rich, kind of actually high flying European, almost kind of education. And they were said, oh no, no, you have no use for that. We're going to focus on agricultural training.

So there's a long history of denying what black families actually want from schools, which is rigor.

So how much was that? A perfect storm. The organizations themselves are pivoting away from practices, values, norms that had gotten that generated these results.

And you have Covid, which just simply diminished the amount of supports that we could offer to schools. Anyway, those two things come together and that gives us. Or would you nuance it different than that?

It seems like it'd be. I don't think either of us agree with that.

Yeah, I don't actually agree with that. No, that's fine. Right. I think in districts, I think Covid had a great deal to do with it. With the further decline. Absolutely.

But because for one, they immediately turn to other things like putting in more air conditioning systems and spending obscene amounts of money on stuff like that, which was probably misguided in hindsight, now that we know more about the disease. But they certainly didn't do much about instruction. So I think it's a different story in charters. Covid, I think, was largely immaterial.

These schools were already deeply losing their way.

The key event on the charter side is George Floyd and the racial reckoning and how the schools responded to the racial reckoning rather than doubling down on what they stood for, which was rigorous academics in service of ending these inequalities that are so pervasive. Instead, they got sucked into a different ideology that proposed a different explanation and solution, which turned out to be incorrect.

And I saw, I mean, also, I think this was like, I think it was like things happening on two tracks. There was the sort of erosion of accountability in the post NCLB era.

Yes, that's very important.

You were starting to see a decline that was happening. And then I think it was more like host Michael Brown even. And then, you know, obviously Trayvon Martin. This was when this got going and.

Because people were justifiably horrified.

And what was striking to me is you had a lot of people who seem not to have been aware of some of these issues previously, and this had thrust it into the limelight. And. And that's actually a good thing. If you want to, like, we can do chapter and verse on why social media is bad. But that was.

That's correct.

Is the focus became very political, very signaling to each other. And we could talk more about.

And then what you saw in the first school, and it was just one school then in almost every classroom, was the official portrait of Barack Obama and his two very young girls, who happened to be exactly the same age as our students, which created additional residents. And there was such a strong sense of racial unity and that we were going to do this together as educators, white educators.

Of course there was tension, there's always going to be tension around this topic in an urban community like Brownsville, where we were located. But there was a very strong sense of common purpose.

When Trump was elected for his first term, this collapse, this fragile sense of optimism was lost.

And then in stepped the thinkers of Ibram Kendi and Robin Diangelo, which were then vulgarized in the work of Timo Kuhn, who's basically one pager became the mainstay of all these trainings. And it.

And these, you should probably say what that one pager is. I think you follow this, they're going to track. But for listeners.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. So the one pager was a document that purported to identify the symptoms of white supremacist culture.

And among them were things like objectivity, urgency, worship of the written word was another one. And so across the country, not just in charters, but equally in large districts, this became the mainstay of anti racist trainings.

And so it created this very simplistic, derivative, reductive Manichean world in which you were partly, by the way, for social reasons, to obtain social standing in that world, you had to prove that you were more anti racist than your colleague, particularly Your white colleague. So there was this jockeying for social position to take ever more radical views of this idea.

There's a wonderful book that I like to hold up, totally obscure, but a former, I think a Daily News reporter, she spent on an education reporter. She spent a year in the New York City schools. And the title is Shut up and Let the Lady Teach. And it has some black and white photographs.

And you know the old notion that a photograph says more than a thousand. You look at this picture, it is devastating.

Just the physical decay, the broken pencils on the floor, the sense of we don't give a fuck is what it conveys on the part of the teachers is what I'm saying. And so this was the disorder. People think that charters were trying to create safety from gangs.

No, they were really trying to address the low level disorders in the classroom that made it impossible to teach and impossible for kids to learn. So people have forgotten that. So what happened then? This attack on no excuses style, discipline.

And by the way, the schools had already recognized their excesses at this point and begun to make very important changes in their disciplinary and cultural approaches. But nonetheless, many networks and schools just didn't have anything to replace those approaches with. So they tore out this.

Yeah.

And discipline completely collapsed. Schools became radically unsafe, like the noble schools, high schools in Chicago. And that was the beginning of the unraveling.

Because if you don't have discipline, you can't do anything.

Of course, I think that's right. We skipped over, I think probably a lot. But you said, you, you said like it started to become like positioning.

And I think like what was happening at this point is like the sort of bipartisan education reform movement had fallen apart and so it was factionalized. This thing we've talked about before and whenever you have that situation, you're going to get your power by being intra factional, more intense.

And you're seeing that now in present times with maga, right, where everybody's competing to be more maga. Yeah, Back then it was the Democrats, everybody competing to be more socially justice oriented. And I mean, I think there were some people who.

Well, I mean, I think, I think there are people, particularly some white people who looked at that coon list and they credibly believed it. And it's because they had moved through life in a way that they'd never been confronted by this.

I remember a conversation with somebody, they're like, perfectionism is a white trait. And I was like, have you ever met like a black United States Marine? And it quickly became clear that actually no, they had not.

And you know, but then there was.

Other people who were just very cynical about it, who to your point, that was how you're going to.

I think we're going to look back on it and just, I mean, just be absolutely astounded that this moment of moral panic occurred and occurred the way it did.

Because, you know, as, as people like John McWhorter have said, you know, who wrote the forge of my book, this is just profoundly condescending towards black people. You're taking traits which are considered to be noxious stereotypes of black people and you're turning them on their head.

So, for example, punctuality is a white supremacist virtue. Perfection is a white. What, what's the converse of that? What are you saying? Right. And so it's, it's incredible.

That put a little more crudely.

Yeah, I'm trying not to be.

David Duke showed up at your anti racist training and agreed with half of it. You should probably pause and rethink what.

It is exactly that you're doing.

It was condescending and somewhat. But there was a moral panic on. I agree. We're at a conference of leaders. Steven, I'd be interested in your take.

Like, why was this such a failure of leadership?

Well, I think.

In your view.

Yeah, yes, I think that is the question. One is that we were caught up in a genuine and much needed reckoning. Right.

I mean, the murder of George Floyd, as you said, coming on a long progression of police violence against black people created an urge, a very broad drive, the largest peaceful protest in American history to address racial injustice.

And when something like that happens, the public and the intellectual leadership and the political leadership needs a dogma or a point of view or a prescription to move forward with. And in that void was found the ideas of d'. Angelo. And so that became the solution.

Everyone jumped on that without realizing in the charter sector that it was profoundly anti intellectual, profoundly anti achievement and completely at odds with what the whole movement was based on, in my view. And I think we're only now and be realizing that that is what came to pass.

I will say that I've only been here for 12 hours, but I think this, this sector is very dug in and people are very afraid to talk about this. I, I think it's still very present the fear factor is very. See, we haven't talked about the other dimension of this. That part of this.

Of this newfound culture was to shame and ostracize and ultimately cancel those who disagreed. So it was an extremely intolerant movement, and that had a lot of people running scared. A lot of people, a lot of great talent just left the sector.

We never talk about that. If you look at.

We've lost a lot for sure. Talk about it all the time. We got all these, you know, people, their early to mid-50s, where they going.

Where they going to spend the rest of their life?

Well, they're now doing things like, you know, running a retail operation. I mean, they've just left education because they were shot out of the cannon.

And I mean, if you look at network like af, they lost the whole two tiers of the. Of the network's management. And these are people who were stellar.

I mean, they were incredibly accomplished and had driven much of the network success. They were just gone. Yeah.

So, I mean, I may be worse.

Though, than what, Stephen? I think an element of this.

You keep talking about these books, and so you've got, you know, Okun coming along, but you've got Kendi and you've got d'. Angelo, and then in academia, you know, you have Crenshaw and Delgado.

Yeah, I could actually understand this more if I felt like what we were having at the leadership level was like a vigorous debate about these claims and counterclaims. But I'm struck by how few people are even familiar with the claims in these books. And to some extent, Kendi doesn't agree with Crenshaw and Delgado.

There's even disagreements amongst them. But people are not like, we're not having any kind of a debate about power and intolerance. And.

And you talk to people who are very strident on this stuff, and you pretty quickly realize they haven't actually, like, read the things that they're claiming. They're telling the rest of us to read Kendi. But it's clear they. They haven't read it.

They haven't, like, thought about CRT one way, whether you're for it or against it. They just haven't, like, thought about it.

And so as a leadership issue, that's what's sort of striking, is how quickly everybody just got on board with something.

I think there's also a lack, a lack of courage, a lack of fortitude among the boards of these organizations. I think that when the mob came, if you will, they didn't say, whoa, stop, let's talk about what our values are and why we're doing this.

And part of it was, I mean, it was just like being hit by a tidal wave.

I mean, it really was because part of the playbook, and of course this playbook originated on college campuses and then was appropriated in the sector. But part of the playbook was that if you engaged in a traditional form of discourse where you say, I hear you, can we talk about it?

You might very well get the response that even you're asking to talk about. It is a form of white supremacist privilege. So if you no longer have civility, if you no longer have discussion, well, you know, then you're stuck.

So I, I would place a lot of responsibility at the board and funder levels. They could have, they, they could have stood tall and said, we are committed to a liberal arts education.

It involves being able to discuss opposing views with civility so that we can together find the truth. That's not what happened. They just ran for the hills.

See, I'm not disputing in any way the general findings that you have. I'm just talking.

I think there's a broader context that made the lack of courage possible or resulted in, I think, because the other pieces I would throw in, you talk about, hey, basically, NCLD waning loss of trust in data.

So first of all, the story that we have, first of all, in the first, you know, in the first place, hey, our kids are actually doing better academically.

The only thing that's better matters is the growth of charter school supposedly makes all other schools worse, right?

At the same time that the Trump thing comes in and all sorts of Trump charter school people are trying to project that they're in some way different from that, from that. And the charter school world hears from our political consultants and others don't say that there's anything different about you.

And traditional public schools don't say anything negative about public schools whatsoever.

And so we're losing our reason to exist. Yes.

When we've lost our reason to exist, then you introduce the contagion that you're talking about. It can now pass through the body, you know, of the movement.

We can't. I, and I'm very clear is what Andy thinks about this.

I agree with you very strongly this particular point that we stop talking about why we exist with respect to the majority system. And if we stop talking about it and we just say nicey nice things. Right.

Yeah.

Which is what the PR consultants told everybody to do, we lose our reason for being. And I think that that was a very important mistake.

I couldn't agree more. I think this is. We talked about this a little bit this morning, and you and I, I think this differentiation issue for charters is an enormous one.

And it's differentiating both with school districts and differentiating with other choice options which are proliferating.

And it was very clear early on our point of difference was we're actually going to educate kids demonstrably. We are pro accountability. We're at peace with testing. We know our kids can do it. The end goal is college with such clarity.

And we lost all of that in part because as some of these places got larger, they hired mainline communication shops who told them, oh, never criticize the school district. Well, hello, we exist to criticize the school district.

Exactly, exactly. And you have this, you know, you.

Have the, if nothing's wrong with the school district, why would your kids come to our school?

And the perverse irony is this was all being done in an effort. People looked and said, the outcomes of this system are terrible. They're highly inequitable.

Opportunity in this country is being allocated by zip code and we can change that. And you had schools.

So again, Massachusetts, you had schools opening up reverse achievement gaps where African American kids were outperforming the suburban white kids. And so the perverse irony is this was being done. Taking down a movement that was generating these kinds of results to improve system of.

They figured out how to do it. You see, I think we're also losing institutional knowledge now because.

It wasn't just little boutiques anymore. It was at scale. And they were very specific things that the big networks learned how to do and they were deeply curious about each other.

They were constantly visiting each other and stealing ideas from each other. And so it's sad because we actually now know, I would submit, how to operate a large system of charters that would produce stellar results.

And one more sort of irony, and then we can get onto some of the counterfactuals that you just. I think we just have to call out. All this was happening at a time when non white people were moving towards the Republicans.

So this was being done in our sector as we're speaking for the communities were of the street.

And what was actually happening is this really profound and hugely consequential shift, electorally speaking, of pretty much everybody who was a non white voter. The. That was where Trump was making gains among all of those demographics.

And so while everybody was turned inward in the education sector, ripping each other's faces off.

Exactly.

You had this big shift happening politically that again, I would say is going to be enormously consequential for the country.

But I don't think that. I don't. I think that that shift is enormously consequential.

I think there started to be obviously a lot of discussion and analysis of why it occurred. I don't see that happening in the charter sector.

Yeah, I think, I mean, you make an argument.

Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

You can make an argument that the biggest accomplishment of the charter school movement in its first 25 years or wherever, you know, this receding started to occur was the amassing of people that, that believe this thing could be done.

Yeah.

And develop the chops to actually get it done.

Yes, that's exactly right.

We became, I believe, complacent about whether or not the movement is going to be able to keep attracting and keep growing. You know, just generally people's commitment and their expertise in this area. We became, we just became blase about how important Charterfolk was.

The reason I made Charterfolk is because, you know, after I left, you know, ccsa and I left at CCSA because of political fights. You know, there is a nuance, but, you know, I had to get out of there for political reasons. And I went on a.

A tour and I visited 30 states across the country and I came back sobered because I would ask people, you know, what is, what is the role of charter schools right now? And I, I came back from those conversations feeling like we had lost any sense of confidence that we were on the right.

That is. That is absolutely remarkable. Contrast that with, I can't remember what year it Was.

And everyone that was invited to do so because of their academic record accepted and within a space of two years had opened additional campuses that were as high performing or higher performing than their original campus. So to me what this showed is that, ah, we can totally scale this.

All students in Boston could go to a high performing charter if we had politically the will to do it. So it's not a, it was not a organic or native obstacle to results at scale. It was purely a, a political internal obstacle. So we've lost that.

Can we pivot to like, you know, how we, how we dig our way out of this, or did you have another way?

No, I think, because I think it's, I mean there's like so much energy at this conference.

Like, and I mean again, one of the discouraging things to me is like most of these goals that the goal is, is equity in terms of making sure kids have equal opportunity and have the supports they need to be successful. There's broad support, sort of the value of diversity.

This conference that we're at, like speak, speak to that, just the incredible diversity that's here of all kinds. And, and so there's all these shared goals.

And yet to what you all said earlier, which I agree with, this sort of ideology has become like very baked in. Like, I don't think it's passed either. I think it's just kind of become baked into the price of things. And that, that's a, that's a troubling thing.

So we should talk about like, I think some of the counterfactuals you. Because from that might come some of the lessons on like where to.

Yes, yes. And by the way, I think what we'll see now is a lot of silence when these concerns are raised.

Say if someone gives a talk, as I did this morning, but then afterwards they come up to you, I wanted just to let you know that I thought what you said was really important. There's a ton of that going. Five of those thank you for good.

And not good thank you for saying thank you. But don't tell me when I said this.

Yeah, but don't tell me. So I said to this one woman who came up to me after the conference, I mean, after I spoke, well, I wish that you had said that.

From the microphone, she said, no, I can't. So it's like, this is where we're at, and this is where we were at five years ago.

So I'm not sure we're making any progress on that front, by the way. But to the. To the counterfactual, do you want to introduce this or do you.

I mean, I think it's a.

Because, I mean, essentially, again, you don't find anyone in this movement, like, saying, like, you know, that, like, what happened to George Floyd was in any way okay, or that, you know, that he shouldn't have been alive the next day after he had interaction with the police. You don't find anybody defending, like people talk about, we're defending systems of oppression.

But I think you have to look pretty hard to find anybody who wants to defend system of oppression in this. In this group of people.

Well, so I'll throw something out.

And then in the school community, we could have said, we are going to turn to academic excellence.

We're no longer going to tolerate that most students from poverty are sitting in ineffective classrooms and demonstrably not learning and come out of 13 years of formal education and can't write a coherent paragraph, because that's where we were then and that's where we are still are today.

And that is why, of course, community colleges have to spend an enormous amount of effort simply getting students the remedial education to be able to function at a pseudo college level.

So if we had, for example, paid attention to that magnificent TNTP report, whose name I will forget, which looked at the instructional tasks that are being put before kids, I think it's such a brilliant way of.

At looking.

Looking at it. You know, every class is basically, kids are being asked to do something. What are they being asked to do?

And is it at grade level or is it markedly below grade level or above grade level. And what they found is that this is a problem of going back to the Bush expression. It is the soft bigotry of low expectation. Low expectations.

The soft bigotry of low expectation. They were being given consistently tasks that are way below what they were capable of doing.

So that was a diagnosis and at the same time a prescription.

We need to ensure that every child has in front of them educationally well constructed tasks that are demonstrably educationally, instructionally effective and are pitched at the level that is challenging and respectful of where they are. And that's not what we did.

Had we done that, had we been consumed with fixing instructional quality, we would have been way on the way towards educational equity and I would argue towards much larger forms of equity. But we didn't do that.

And the interesting thing is that is, and it was actually, we should note, it was Dick Riley, who was Clinton Secretary of Education, came up with like the tyranny of low expectations or something. Bush flipped it to soft bigotry.

Both are fantastic phrases to describe this, which I think, and you talk a little bit in the book, it's sort of a palliative approach to education rather than an academic one. Yes, but this is happening now.

When you look at the NAEP data, I think one of the things everybody throws their hands up and says, well, the NAEP data is all terrible and it's not great, but it's also not even. There are states that are making progress and they're basically doing what you're talking about. They're using high quality instructional materials.

They're really serious about reading and increasingly math. They're doing all these things.

And, and let me just name two others. They're to your point, Andy, they're, they're putting in. We've at last won the war on phonics. Right. On science of reading.

They're ensuring that all children are given a scientifically competent early phonics instruction so they can become decoders. That's great, but that's only the start. Now these states that you're describing recognize that knowledge is not a skill.

I mean reading comprehension is not a skill. It's the accretion of exposure to knowledge. And they're trying to put in place knowledge rich curriculum. So they are bright spots.

The other bright spot I would suggest are high performing charters that never made the move away from this stuff like Brook, like success, like classical. And I would also say today a lot of these classical focused charter schools that are unabashedly pro great literature, ambitious literature.

These, these People are killing it.

Yeah. I mean, like, yes. Is still nailing it. DSST looks pretty dang good. Harmony schools. I've been to a lot of Harmony schools. Every single one of them.

Yeah.

You know, they got a lot of good stuff going on. So there is. There is a base of schools that I think did not get completely knocked off their moorings.

That's right.

I mean, one other thing I would put out there as far as, you know, counterfactual.

And I have this experience at CCSA when we hired a lot of young progressive people to be our parent organizers working to win Los Angeles Unified School Board races. And we won.

But what I noticed when we brought these young people in is they were very progressive, very focused on social justice issues, and they immediately wanted to pivot to other issues outside of education. Let's get involved in criminal justice.

Yes.

You know, let's get involved in sentencing. What's going on with. Let's get healthcare or whatever it was. And.

And I just spent a lot of time and I just realized our world just does not know how much unfairness is cooked into the DNA of public education.

And when I was able to bring it back to them and talk about red lines and attendance boundaries, you know, when we were able to talk about fiscal practices that over and over again, Los Angeles Unified sucks money away from Watts and East LA to subsidize the schools on the west side. And when you can show this stuff now, we can anchor our people and stay focused on our stuff.

But from an advocacy perspective, as far as I can tell, our world refused to take on that stuff because we would not criticize the public school system. And so when Trump came along, there was. Let me just finish.

Yeah, sorry.

When Trump came along, you know, our world is somewhat like, oh, how do we. How do we. Virtue project here. How do we Values project.

We ended up values projecting on a bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with education, being Muslim, travel banned. The California Charter School association is making comments on that. What the heck?

When.

If we had inarguably been going forward with policy agendas, trying to, like, get rid of these things, our world would have known on some of these issues of fairness that people do still motivate for. We're doing our stuff on that. Meanwhile, keep our focus on. On academic rigor.

Instead, we like, you know, in the convoluted mess of it, you know, basically let it all. All drop.

Oh, I mean, I. To me, it creates a permission structure not to focus on results. There's lots of stuff that's bad. The Muslim travel ban is a good example of that.

But there's 168 hours in the week. And so you got to figure out what are you going to focus on and what do you care about? And you can't fix all the world's ills.

And very quickly, if you, and I think this is part of what's happened at a leadership level, if you care about everything, then you care about nothing, in effect. And so you have to pick your spots. We're education people and so we intersect with a few things like health care and housing and so forth.

But there's a whole bunch of other stuff that's just way far. It doesn't mean it's not bad and not a problem and not inequitable. But you, you can't. Like you, you.

If you're focused on that, then you're not focused on our core thing, which is teaching and learning, instruction and school improvement.

Exactly, exactly. And so that's right, we lost.

We lost the basic supposition that within these four walls, despite all of these other social injustices around us, despite racism, despite poverty, despite family issues, we have what it takes to educate students, students to a high level. That was the driving premise of early charters, and it's profoundly powerful.

And going along with that, of course, was the idea of no excuses, not making. It's not about kids, people. So it's a terrible name for that reason. People think it's about not wailing on kids. It's not about that at all.

It's about, it's about as adults in the building, we're going to stop blaming poverty, blaming all these other things and say, no, we're not going to do that anymore, because that's just excuse making. We actually can educate to a high level despite those problems.

And that stopped the moment that we went all Kendi, because Kendi and others said, no, the derivation of all of these other inequities, racial inequities, is downstream of structural racism. And structural racism was never defined. Structural racism is really just a synonym for the inequities itself. So it didn't offer a solution.

It didn't say what to do.

Right.

But to your point, Andy, it just took all the focus off of great instruction and off of the belief that, yes, you know what, we actually do have the means to do it.

And it was peculiar as a book. His first book, you know, stamped the description of testing and how it works was like wildly bastardized.

And so again, like you would think, the leadership of this Sector would say these are important issues to discuss and debate and we should engage with them. But let's engage with them with a book or an author that's actually approaching them.

Well, there's the famous paragraph in the second Kendi book that attacks testing. And it is a total confusion from first word to last. It conflates. No, I mean, it's an astounding paragraph. You remember this paragraph?

I mean, it's just astounding. It conflates IQ testing. Right. With achievement testing.

I mean, and if you remember, we don't have to go back long during the peak of the opt out movement and testing. I need a date, guys. But you know that, right? It's a while when everybody.

When we lost Park Slope.

When we lost Park Slope, by the way, we never lost the black community at all. No, it was, it was after white parents who wanted out of testing. And it was a brief thing and it, and it died down fairly quickly.

But at that moment, all of the leading national civil rights organizations from the aclu, the naacp, La Raza, all put out a joint statement saying no, testing is good. Testing is very important. Otherwise we will no longer illuminate these disparities and have a path for their solution.

That statement is one of the best press releases. It was absolutely unequivocal in its embrace of accountability.

So. But I'm, I'm with you guys.

Maybe my, my seat on this is just different with, you know, California with a large, large number of schools, a large number of stakeholders.

California is weird.

And you've got CTA just spending millions, you're a billionaire plot, you know, people getting accosted in supermarkets. Why are you friends of charter school? You know?

Yeah.

And yes, we must keep a focus on instruction and academic excellence for sure.

But I also think that our stakeholders need to feel as though the advocacy heft of the growing movement is being put toward these problems that aren't only self supporting for the sector itself. We want. Parents are getting screwed over and there are all sorts of ways for them to get something better.

They can get access to other great schools or they can get access to our schools.

But the lack of clear evidence in the landscape that the overall sector was pushing toward those kinds of policy ends, I think made our world much more difficult.

But I think what you're getting at is, to me, the most dangerous thing about the charter movement, I mean, dangerous in a good way, dangerous for the status quo, was it showed it can be done as like what Stephen was saying earlier. It showed that even all else equal with all these problems, you can do a substantially better job. You can propel kids into lives of opportunity.

And this is a sector where I was just talking with a friend today who's a school principal, was talking about how the strategy for improving the school was which kids they could move in through various kinds of transfers and changes, not how do you improve the school through better instruction.

Right.

And that's the ethos. Right. And if you want.

So if you want Democrats to come on board, you have to really change this whole belief system system because there is a subtle racism out there of. And it's also classism of like you can't expect a lot from these kids. So we've got to have this palliative approach.

And the charters, the, the best ones they just put on the table that. No, that's actually. And you can actually do all else equal to a much better job if all else wasn't equal.

We actually address some of these other social issues. Just think what we could do.

And I think that's what we need people to get back behind because people in this sector, particularly who are very social justice oriented, need to understand this was a social justice play for the campaign, if you define it in social media.

And I think you're raising a very interesting nuance here, Andy, which is I think that many of the white advocates of the Kendi style social justice explanations actually themselves hold low beliefs about low income black and brown students can do. I really do believe that. And so as you, palliative was a very good word.

So they're very drawn to things that I think we at this table would find very condescending, which is we should spend more time on addressing children's trauma and the trauma of their teachers. And so it becomes a very therapeutic kind of intervention. Academics is subordinated to a therapeutic intervention, which I talk about in the book.

And I think that is one of the worst aspects of what is happening right now. Because the fact is many teachers would be very drawn to that because they enter teaching is a helping profession.

They are deeply empathetic and compassionate human beings. And so if you as a school system say it's okay to focus mainly on therapy or social emotional learning, they will jump at that.

That's very compelling to them. So there's a constant need to reassert that. No, actually if we really care about kids, we need to educate them.

And if we educate them, they're going to hold a very high sense of self and sense of agency and sense of capacity. One of the biggest indictments of Social justice education is that it is capacity reducing.

Children feel they do not have capacity to make their way in the world. And that's what makes me, I think, the most angry about it.

And I think a great section of the book that was powerfully said is you have the sort of these five evasions that you talk about. And I almost think it's a great book and I encourage people to read it.

But if you're only going to read one chapter because I like it just does a really good job. It reminds me very much of, like, A.O. hirschman's, like, rhetoric of reaction book.

Like, you just lay out, here are the things you are going to hear about this and here's why they're mistaken. And I think that it's a very important. It's a very important section because there is. To what you're saying. There are these.

These belief systems run deep and they are problematic.

I also love the chapter just about, you know, why school Districts are ultimately not reformable. I mean, it's. Well, because, you know, I feel like it is an elephant in the room that people just will not take.

And, but. And can I just say, we used to talk about that at the beginning of the, of the movement. We talked about it a lot.

Yeah.

By the tone of political leaders, including some superintendents, who were far more direct in describing the failures of their very own systems. The language was much more vivid. It wasn't all of this euphemized.

I worked for one in San Diego. Alan Burson was one of them.

That's a very good example. He just spoke very directly about our failure. So we don't hear that anymore.

And then people just don't realize that what I call the operating system of large urban systems is fundamentally incompatible with high achievement. I mean, look at what the best charters are doing.

As I said, they're doing things like the one month of professional development before the year starts. That's very time very well spent. When it's done well, you go deep into the maw of techniques or you go deep into your math curriculum.

You have teachers practice it in a fishbowl setting, getting feedback. This stuff is incredibly powerful. But you could never do that in a unionized setting.

You get one day to bring your teachers together before you teach. What contempt are we showing for children by those kinds of policies? So, no, I. And you know, look, at New York schools. Right.

We've had what, 15 superintendents in 25 years.

So if we think that some God is going to step up and suddenly make it work, the closest we got was under Bloomberg, of course, and it's even all of Bloomberg's reforms have been dismantled, save one. Urban charters.

That's right. Well, we're going to have to wrap this up. I want to get to a little bit though.

There's got to be some hope here like how we dig ourselves out of this thing and you know, we're not going to get out of there in one fell swoop or not getting out in one year.

But you know, if we're, if we're here a couple of years from now and, and there's the kind of progress that you think we should be making, what are going to be indicators, you know, a year or two down the road that maybe we're getting our bearings again.

I think honest conversation about the wrong turn will become permissible. We'll hear it. We'll have honest conversations with each other. We're not there yet. That hasn't started, I don't think.

But you were invited to speak.

Thank you. That's very true. And I'm extremely grateful to Starlee and to Andrea for that opportunity. You're absolutely right. I was invited to speak.

That's a big deal.

I think people realize this is an.

Issue and you're, you're quite right.

Some challenges that. The first reaction is probably going to be some silence and discomfort.

Yeah, that's what I got to.

If we don't, if we don't give up on it, though.

Yeah.

You know, I think.

No, you're absolutely right. And I'm being, I'm being ungenerous because I, I was invited. That's a, that's a big risk to take and it's a great setting and so that's encouraging.

And I think the other thing is I think we're going to hear a lot more about these very high performing networks that didn't change course and the results that we're getting. I think the classical schools movement is going to get a lot of airtime, as it should. So I think that.

What do you think, what do you both think on this question that you're asking? What are the positive signs going forward?

I mean, I feel like this is a people issue. I think this is a people issue. I have a secret hope that some of these people that exited, they're going to recognize that they're needed.

And my own conversations with Many of them is. They know it, actually.

I agree. I've had the same conversations, so.

And I also feel like while they've gone on and they're doing some other things, while they feel at least batteries charged and not completely depleted, they're bored.

Out of their minds.

They're not. They. And they know, they're like, hey, Shelby did this until he was 80. I mean, I got a lot more years left in me.

I think we're going to get some of those.

They're wrestling with what to do with their talents.

And one guy, Douglas, look what that guy can do. Bring these people back and get them plugged into organization is another great one. Great one.

But I also feel as though your point, you know, to realize that. That the newcomers that are coming in, you know, we've also got to be filtering for, you know, what is their reason for coming in.

Yeah, if they're just looking for a job, that's just. We're gonna end up with our having a district orientation toward things. But I think that.

I think we have the potential with a lot of focus on our newcomers, supported by some of these old timers that could, like, acquaint them.

Another place where we may see some positive energy is if the. The philanthropic community. Philanthropic community may be able to recognize the wrong turn and speak out about it and push the sector back on track.

Does that make sense? Is that possible?

Well, it has to. Or we need philanthropists because, like, that is where the resources come from and to the end. And it's where people take their cues off of.

And so, yeah, to the. Yeah, to the extent they make it safe for people to do the things you're talking about to lead, they make it safe for these networks.

And to the extent they make it fraught, it'll go the other direction.

Bloomberg foundation, of course, Kevin at the Charles Growth foundation, if those people were able to come forward and speak up and say, guys, we have a problem, we need to fix it, I think it would make an immense difference.

Cal said something years ago that I think like, is. He said to me, it was very early days of the reform movement.

He said, you look at the people, everyone's betting their careers on this and the risk they're taking, he's like, that's a signal that we're going to succeed. And we then did. And some of the things you're talking about, we saw these transformative schools that were changing lives and outcomes, and you had.

It's sort of the average bear problem or the average bear sort of indicator you had suddenly people coming into this movement just because they thought it was the corporate cool thing to do. They weren't necessarily committed to education as an instrument of social change, but it was the cool place to be.

You had politicians who were like I don't know what this is all about, but everyone's red reform. The average bears came over.

So I think the indicator to answer your question that I would look for in a few years is are the average bears coming back? Right now you've got two kinds of people largely in the sector.

You've got the true believers who genuinely believe the transformative power of education and that like it's not going to solve all of our problems. But it's hard to see see us having a more equitable just society without a better education system.

And then you got the zealots and we'll know we're succeeding if you got the average bears coming back in who are like oh okay, this looks like a good place to be. There's cool stuff happening.

And right now frankly those people are in climate and other things and like we'll know we're succeeding when they come back and politicians and philanthropists come back. But I think that core idea we shouldn't lose that. It is possible. So success with the thing. We're not trying to create something that nobody has seen.

We're trying to recreate something that was a powerful moment. It doesn't wasn't without its problem. It wasn't without its problem.

It wasn't without its problems. And we should acknowledge that they were changes that were made in response that were necessary.

But yes, one of the things I'm worried about is that we're going to lose the institutional knowledge of what made those systems very hyper focused farming. So it's really important that we document the mechanisms by which that success was obtained because it we, we know what we did.

I'm going to throw in one more as before we get to that.

I agree. That's the technical problem.

That's a technical problem.

We also don't want to lose sort of the sort of aspirational that absolutely what is possible. I worry, I worry we potentially lose both.

I'm going to throw in one more just from the authorizer advocate perspective too.

I just feel as though having clear minimum performance performance expectations for schools and some schools being closed and a bar rising and our work totally embracing this is super important and we've let that go. But I actually feel like it's something would be fairly easy to reassemble and because It's.

It's hard to define quality, but when you really get into the performance and see how low performance is as a result of some of the instructional practices you're talking about.

Jed, you were so spot on. If there isn't an accountability system at the testing level, but also at the authorizer level, that is just crucially important. You know, the.

The SUNY created great charters because it was willing to close bad ones. And it was very clear about that and it was very clear how excellence was defined. It had a very sophisticated evaluation.

R. So if we lose those things, this is a big problem.

Yeah, I will. I will take the prerogative of one of the hosts. Today's my last day on the Virginia Board of Education when we're.

Yeah, congratulations.

We got an accountability system in place. That was the reason I went back on the board.

Congratulations.

Couple of years. And this idea that you need to measure in a transparent way and report is absolutely instrumental to all of this.

And there's so much pressure on measurement. But there's also some states that are trying to. I don't know what will happen with it over time. Time, but there's some states that are.

Trying to move forward counterexample. Massachusetts, the highest performing state, now has the lowest graduation requirements from high school in the country.

And, and the advocacy world from. Is getting strong enough in most situations.

If we're going to keep, you know, an underperforming school alive, we're probably building enough advocacy strength to do it. The question is, are we going to put our advocacy strength toward accountability?

Are we going to, like, actively want underperforming schools to close? I'm guardedly optimistic, but there's a lot more discussion to your point that even in the advocacy realm needs to happen.

Well, plenty more to talk about, but we want to end just by thanking Stephen for taking time. The book is the Lost Decade. I would highly recommend it.

Hey, you got Two Colors.

He's got the. The pre press version.

Oh, gee, now I know. Now I know who's loved around here. Jeez.

It's a no.

This one's better.

That one doesn't have any misspelling. It's a fantastic and important book. And as Steven said, it's just an important con.

Wherever you come down on this, it's just an important conversation that this sector needs to have.

If we're going to have a healthy, robust sector, we need to be able to have conversations about these kinds of things and figure out where we've been and where we're going so, Stephen, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me. Really a privilege. Thank you.

Great.