The Show-Trial Rhetoric That Took Down a Charter-School Founder
About 10 years ago, Steven Wilson founded the Ascend charter school in Brooklyn. Ascend is now a network with 15 schools; they serve mostly poor kids of color from kindergarten to high-school age, and they work. Test scores there outstrip New York City averages. Some charter schools have become notorious for excessively punitive discipline; Ascend examined and revised its disciplinary practices in response.
Social justice in action, no? But Wilson is white, he sees excesses in the far left’s take on classroom education, he deigned to say so in an obscure blog post this summer—and he seems to have been fired as a result.
The group “Friends of Ascend” initiated a titled “Hold the CEO of Ascend Public Charter Schools Accountable for White Supremacist Rhetoric.” More than 500 signed it, and out Wilson went. Julia Bator, a co-chair of the Ascend board, told staff that the board’s “decision is not the result of a single event or a simple that the board examined Wilson’s record after the blog post and that Ascend had fallen behind on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” However, I suspect that minus the blog post, Wilson would still have his job, and the petition remains Exhibit A of what has become an extremely problematic—to recruit a term popular with the set in question—form of expression in modern educated America.
