Excuse the clickbait title. Let me clear up any possible incoming misconception and be candid with you. The answer to that question is, for me, an unequivocal “no.” But for Steven Wilson, founder of the Ascend Learning charter school network and author of a forthcoming book tentatively titled The Lost Decade, the answer seems to be “yes.”

In the post-racial-awakening backlash, it seems very “of-the-moment” for leaders of a certain status across the political spectrum to lay societal (and particularly educational) ills at the feet of those often labeled dismissively as “social justice warriors.”

In a recent interview with Education Next, he paints the urban charter school sector as having gone to a place where “academics are less of a focus, and the new focus is on social justice.” This, for him, is in turn the primary cause for declines in education attainment for some formerly “no excuses” charter schools.

It’s true educational achievement has fallen largely across the board over the past decade. I didn’t expect someone with such deep charter school bona fides to put such a sweeping ailment at the foot of a more conscious pursuit of justice for students of color. His assertion, though, lacks depth or backing.

Another round of the blame game

What’s the cause of some urban charter schools seeing their achievement regress closer to the norm of other local public school districts? (Though it’s worth noting that in most cases, and this is certainly true in Indianapolis, they continue to outperform urban public school districts, oftentimes by wide margins.) For Wilson, tracing the root means a visit to America’s higher education institutions. “It began with a change in the culture on campus, a turning away from a liberal education,” Wilson says. “There was a new progressive left that emerged that was wary of traditional liberal arts commitments.”

The graduates of these apparently newly-illiberal universities then supposedly went to work in urban charter schools nationwide. And in the process, in his formulation, they made everything about antiracism and social justice rather than student achievement (I’ll come back to this either/or framing later).

Education Next’s interviewer thankfully pressed on this, asking, “But how does it penetrate into charter schools?” To which Wilson offers, “It penetrates very deeply,” with no additional evidence beyond reasserting his position that the trickle of newly-minted illiberal graduates into these schools is at fault for academic declines. It’s the school reform equivalent of, “We would have got away with continued academic gains if it weren’t for you meddling kids.”

Education Next pushed again, asking, “Is there evidence that these schools have in fact become not as effective?” In response, Wilson says, “What we are beginning to see anecdotally is that very high-flying, no-excuses schools are starting to turn in results that have plummeted to the level of the surrounding district.”

Anecdotes and vibes alone do not drive the car called “trends in education.” Now, there are real quibbles to be parsed when it comes to how schools have sometimes gone about equity work and DEI initiatives. They are too often lip service, surface-level, and centered on getting white folks to process feelings rather than fundamentally changing anything that needs to change in order to benefit students who are being denied equal opportunity and dignity.

But good-faith criticism of where DEI work sometimes goes wrong this is not. I wouldn’t be so annoyed except that this is the classic playbook of a certain type of intellectual elite with a bone to pick about shifting cultural norms. Notice a societal trend (declining student achievement in some areas), blame a tangential cultural shift (a rise in antiracist thinking).

Wilson is to education reform as Jerry Seinfeld is to comedy. Perhaps they both missed the class where we learned that correlation is not causation.

Wilson’s false binary

My other major concern with Wilson’s view is how it paints a false binary of the options before us. He seems to believe schools can either embrace “racial equity” or embrace “student achievement.” Not only is that a false choice in principle, it’s also false in practice.

Numerous local examples exist of charter schools that pursue rigorous, accelerated student achievement but do so in the context of what you might think of as equity work. Look no further than the four schools/networks highlighted in this recent “Equity in Action” report.

• BELIEVE Circle City High School
• Circle City Prep
• Herron Classical Schools
• Paramount Schools of Excellence

It’s worth interrogating possible reasons for the nationwide decline in education outcomes over the past decade (thankfully people like Scott Aldeman are giving it real thought). Some charter schools have experienced the slide, others have weathered the storm, still others have accelerated their students’ learning despite prevailing trends.

But it is schools like the above that show Wilson’s blaming of racial equity as the root cause for some declines as the straw man that it is.