Steven Wilson is a Senior Fellow with the Center on Reinventing Public Education. For three decades, Steven has sought to spark change in urban public education—offering fresh ideas in his writing and research, shaping legislative change, and opening new schools that prove what’s possible. Steven founded and built Ascend Learning, a growing network of tuition-free, liberal arts charter schools that today educates 5,500 students in Central Brooklyn. Ascend demonstrated the power of a warm and joyful school culture focused not on ensuring compliance but on fostering student agency—and not only closed but reversed achievement gaps. His first book, Reinventing the Schools: A Radical Plan for Boston, drove the development and passage of the Massachusetts charter school law. Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools, won the Virginia and Warren Stone prize for an outstanding book on education and society. Steven is a Pahara-Aspen fellow and a graduate of Harvard University.
In TNTP’s 2018 report The Opportunity Myth, the consequences of low expectations endemic in America’s classrooms are laid bare. Students’ lives, the authors wrote, “were slipping further away each day, unbeknownst to them and their families—not because they couldn’t learn what they needed to reach them, but because they were rarely given a real chance to try.
As the new school year approaches, big-city superintendents everywhere confront the chasm between their students’ needs and their districts’ capacity to meet them.
As the new school year approaches, big-city superintendents everywhere confront the chasm between their students’ needs and their districts’ capacity to meet them.
New York City has been brought to a halt; only the sirens of ambulances pierce the fateful silence. But for Success Academy students, learning continues.
Three much-admired school networks in Indianapolis didn’t skip a beat in going virtual. At Purdue Polytechnic High School, which enrolls 442 students at two campuses in the city, remote learning kicked off this past Monday, after schools closed throughout the city last Friday afternoon.
In a remarkable webinar this afternoon, Success Academy shared their plans for going virtual starting Thursday. None of us have been through anything like this before, and no one can claim a solution for shuttered schools.
“A Charter for Change,” Al Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, titled his column in the New York Times one Sunday some three decades ago.
With news that federal funding for charter school programs is in question, the time seems ripe for an open debate on the promise of—and the barriers to—charter growth.
Success Academy doesn’t lack for press. And for good reason. There’s the eye-popping academic performance: 99 percent of students proficient in math, 90 percent in English Language Arts.
Success Academy doesn’t lack for press. And for good reason. There’s the eye-popping academic performance: 99 percent of students proficient in math, 90 percent in English Language Arts.
Introduction from CRPE director Robin Lake: I am delighted to introduce a new contributor to this blog and a new Senior Fellow at CRPE, Steven Wilson.
