The Self-Defeating Condescension of an Anti-Racist Education
How an “ideological purity spiral” derailed some of America’s most promising classrooms.
Some 15 years after the No Child Left Behind Act promised to close the racial achievement gap, it looked as if charter schools were making real progress toward that goal. Using data from 2015 to 2019, Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes reported that more than 200 charter networks were closing or even reversing racial disparities in reading, math, or both. Their Black and Latino students were equaling or outpacing white students in the same states. “More critically,” the report’s authors wrote, “there is strong evidence that these gap-busting schools can be scaled.”
Then, just as the charter sector was posting striking results, many school networks strayed from their commitment to academic excellence. Staff-led demands for social justice convulsed the schools. “Anti-racism” and “equity” displaced effective instruction as their top priority. Indeed, I experienced the period’s fervor firsthand in Ascend, the charter network I founded in Brooklyn. In a 2019 blog post, I expressed concern that training teachers to recognize “worship of the written word” as “white supremacy culture,” as many equity trainers urged, could alienate students of color from school. A firestorm followed, and I was asked to stay home. I was never to return. At many networks that served students of color from low-income families, academic performance plummeted—and has scarcely recovered.
Although the fervor for performative anti-racism has subsided, Black and Latino children continue to suffer its consequences. Misguided reform wiped away some of the greatest progress that modern educators have made toward racial equality. Today, the average Black 12th grader scores lower than about 75 percent of his or her white peers.
Yet certain charter schools rejected staffers’ demands and kept their focus on academic excellence, continuing to report exceptional results for disadvantaged students, even through the pandemic. They show the charter sector how to rebuild what was lost—and point the way to closing the achievement gap in America’s schools.
While earning her law degree at Yale, in the late 1990s, Dacia Toll signed up to teach for New Haven’s public schools. As Toll later recalled, “almost every form of inequality” that she studied “was downstream of unequal investments we were making in kids, specifically in low-income kids of color.” The achievement gap, she concluded, was “the civil-rights issue of our time.” Yet in the middle-school social-studies classroom to which she was assigned, she struggled. Her students were three years behind in reading. How could she teach the historical novel Johnny Tremain when they couldn’t understand the text? “Oh, just show them the movie,” her mentor at the school advised.
Instead, Toll and a fellow Yale Law graduate started their own middle school in the city. Operating under a charter from the state, Amistad Academy was publicly funded, tuition free, open to all, and accountable for its academic results: If student outcomes fell short, Connecticut could decline to renew its five-year license. The school day ran from 7:30 a.m. to at least 4 p.m., with three hours devoted to reading and writing. Class participation earned students a merit; minor infractions, like talking out of turn, led to a demerit. Every day, students celebrated their classmates’ achievements. The pennants of teachers’ alma maters decorated classrooms, and students learned from kindergarten that college was their destiny. Amistad’s assiduous attention to dozens of such particulars—what came to be known in the charter sector as the “one hundred 1 percent solutions”—resulted in extraordinary academic outcomes. Within three years of Amistad’s founding, its students—nearly all Black or Latino, and from low-income families—were performing on par with those from Greenwich, one of America’s wealthiest towns.
Amistad’s success gained wide notice. In 2003, the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education invited Toll to open three schools in the district. Soon she established Achievement First, a nonprofit network of charters, of which Amistad was the flagship. In 2019, Achievement First enrolled 14,000 students in 37 schools across Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island. That year, nearly two-thirds of its seniors received an offer of admission from the country’s “most competitive” or “highly competitive” colleges, per Barron’s ranking.
But precisely as its students triumphed, Achievement First retreated from its founding commitments. In 2019, the network rewrote its long-standing values. Its first commitment, “Results Without Excuses or Shortcuts,” became “Lead for Racial Equity.” Former employees described to me the rash of policy changes that ensued. The merit and demerit system was scrapped; critics had claimed it was a tool of racialized power and control. The network’s successful middle-school math program was retired. A new curriculum braided social-justice teachings into daily math problems—and posted inferior outcomes. Out, too, was grade promotion based on achievement and attendance; in came promotion by age. The network discontinued its long-standing school report cards, which had provided leaders with an objective measure of their schools’ quality, including not only student outcomes but also staff and student satisfaction. Discipline unraveled, and once-orderly classrooms turned chaotic.
After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, tensions in the organization exploded. Longtime colleagues excoriated one another in internal town meetings. In a diary entry, one veteran staff member observed that “Lead for Racial Equity” on its face made “perfect sense.” But in practice, it fostered a “highly radicalized, toxic organizational culture: one where you’re labeled either an anti-racist or a racist, where there’s rampant fear, where everything is a grievance, and where basic norms of professionalism are out the window.” Achievement First, the employee wrote, was experiencing an “ideological purity spiral.” The network hemorrhaged employees. Toll and her co-CEO of 20 years resigned. Test scores tumbled.
The damage proved lasting: Last year, Achievement First’s New York City schools performed scarcely better than the district on the annual state tests, marking a steep drop from their 2019 results.
(Lisa Margosian, the CEO of Achievement First, said in a statement that the network “remains deeply committed to high expectations for all students, rigorous instruction,” and “safe and joyful classrooms.” Margosian added that Achievement First listens “to student, family, and staff feedback as we refine our approach. Our schools continue to outperform our host districts on key academic measures.”)
Achievement First wasn’t the only network to struggle. In Chicago, the charter network Noble Schools routinely outperformed the city’s district students on college entrance exams, even though students arrived at Noble with lower average test scores. In 2019, it garnered 10 of the top 15 slots in the city’s school-quality rankings. Then Noble embraced “anti-racism.” In a note to alumni, its leaders apologized for the schools’ “assimilationist, patriarchal, white supremacist and anti-black” practices. Gone were school uniforms and the demerit system. Students would no longer get worse grades for misbehaving or handing in work late.
When Noble reopened after the pandemic abated, tardy rates soared, staff satisfaction plummeted, and violence on campus, previously rare, spiked. Noble students’ scores had once towered over those of their district peers. Now they fell below city averages.
Elsewhere, many urban school systems committed to “anti-racist” programming rather than the painstaking work of improving classroom instruction—the one hundred 1 percent solutions. In Buffalo, New York, the associate superintendent, Fatima Morrell, launched an “emancipation curriculum” in 2020 that aimed to address systemic oppression and racism. Two years later, Time heralded Morrell as one of 10 “innovative teachers” for her pursuit of equity as the head of instruction in the district. By 2023, however, students of color were performing no better than when the curriculum began. Just 9 percent of Black and 6 percent of Latino eighth graders were proficient in math; just one in one hundred of either group was advanced.
In 2021, California’s Department of Education sought to make math “relevant” by inflecting every unit with social-justice themes and providing students with a “toolkit and mindset to identify and combat inequities.” The same year, the National Education Association, a teachers’ union representing 3 million members in more than 14,000 communities, pledged to equip schools with a study that “critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.” In 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English announced that the time had come “to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education,” in an effort to “disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism.”
To accelerate these changes, school districts across the country enrolled staff in anti-racist trainings. A mainstay of these programs was a pamphlet called “White Supremacy Culture” written by Tema Okun, an equity trainer and self-described spiritual coach. Okun, who is white, identifies 15 “characteristics of white supremacy culture,” including “objectivity,” “perfectionism,” and a “sense of urgency.” In 2019, the New York City Department of Education, which educates 900,000 children across some 1,600 schools, held a mandatory anti-bias training for all administrators. Okun’s document took center stage. Participants completed a personal scorecard of their “white privilege.” As an adviser to the department explained, “Having to talk about someone’s own whiteness is a requirement for them to become liberated.”
At the heart of the new social-justice education was “trauma-informed teaching.” Equity consultants instructed schools to undertake a program of healing, beginning with staff members of color, who bore the trauma inflicted by not only their school but also their country. White staff, meanwhile, had to “interrupt” their complicity in the racism in which they were acculturated. Teachers were encouraged to act as therapists and relax rigor, ease grading, and lessen homework. Student achievement was, for now, a distant concern.
As social-justice programming diverted many high-performing charter networks, others remained focused on academic rigor and continued to excel. In Boston, the Brooke Charter Schools became a haven for educators from other charters who had grown dismayed by their school’s ideological turn. In 2023, 70 percent of Brooke’s eighth-grade students were proficient in math; by contrast, fewer than one in four district-school students in Boston met that bar. In New York City, the Classical Charter Schools emerged from the pandemic with stronger academic outcomes. Most of the network’s schools are located in the country’s poorest congressional district, in the South Bronx, and nearly all of its students are Black or Latino. But as of last year, 98 percent of its students were proficient in math, and 96 percent were proficient in English.
Administrators regularly urge teachers to “meet students where they are.” But not at schools like Brooke and Classical. The bromide invites teachers to underestimate their students. In 2018, the centrist nonprofit TNTP (formerly the New Teacher Project) published a report finding that most schoolchildren—especially students of color and from low-income families—had teachers who set low expectations and assigned below-grade work. Over the course of a year, TNTP found, students lost the equivalent of six months of learning because their schools didn’t ask enough of them. Top-performing charter networks, by contrast, took pains to ensure that their teachers followed well-crafted, challenging lessons that reliably imparted new understanding.
Social-justice education is harming the very students it was meant to help. America’s most marginalized children are being left less educated, more excluded, and more vulnerable. The country owes every child the kind of schooling that, not long ago, its best charter networks sought to provide: an expansive liberal-arts education. In this model, teachers systematically build their students’ knowledge in the traditional disciplines of history, science, mathematics, and literature. So equipped, children are prepared to think for themselves and spar with ideas not their own. Such an education feeds their curiosity, safeguards their intellectual humility, and develops their capacity for empathy. Their teachers see them not as representatives of intersectional identities but as unique individuals, each with his or her own heritages, curiosities, and passions—each child to be cherished and known.
Without academic excellence, social-justice education accords marginalized children neither education nor justice. It offers only condescension.
*Illustration sources: North Carolina Central University / Getty; Images / Getty; H. Armstrong Roberts / Alamy.
This article was adapted from Steven F. Wilson’s book, The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America.
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