How Wokeness Destroyed an Education Miracle
Steven Wilson’s The Lost Decade1 is not just a book—it’s a requiem. It’s a mournful recounting of a moment when the education-reform movement, particularly the “no excuses” charter school model, seemed poised to deliver on an audacious promise: With focus, energetic effort, and commitment, schools could close the achievement gap between black and white students, lift low-income children out of poverty, and rewrite the script of American education.
For a brief, shining moment, we had it right. And then we lost our nerve. Wilson’s book, a meticulous autopsy of this rise and fall, is both a sympathetic chronicle and a call to a reckoning. The tragedy isn’t that “no excuses” failed—it’s that we convinced ourselves that it did.
Let’s rewind the tape. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the first charter schools were opening and promising to be “engines of innovation” that would shake American education from its somnambulance, a new breed of inner-city school emerged: unapologetically rigorous, laser-focused on results, and built on the insistence that poverty need not be destiny. Schools like KIPP (the “Knowledge Is Power Program”), Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, YES Prep, and the Noble Schools didn’t just talk about high expectations—teachers and staff embodied and enforced them. Stealing a page from the era’s “broken windows” policing model, these schools sweated the small stuff. There were crisp school uniforms, homework assignments every night, students sitting up straight with eyes tracking the teacher, along with carefully crafted lessons and an ambitious curriculum. No more hand-wringing and no more alibis to explain away our multi-generational failure to adequately educate minority children and lift families out of poverty. More than a charter school model, no-excuses was a rallying cry: No child is a failure. We, rather, have failed children.
