How an Education Visionary Got Canceled

NEW YORK — Last year, on the morning of June 27, hundreds of people filled the gilt-ceilinged Kings Theater in Flatbush for the graduation of Brooklyn Ascend High School’s first senior class. The valedictorian, Chyna Campbell, took the stage and spoke about the value of perseverance.

She had come to Ascend in second grade unable to read, and now she was headed to Franklin & Marshall, in Pennsylvania, to study neuroscience and eventually become a doctor.

By any measure, this should have been a day of abundant satisfactions for Steven Wilson. All 60 graduates — brought up in some of the most challenging neighborhoods in the city — were bound for college. Wilson was chief executive of Ascend, the consortium of Brooklyn charter schools he built, beginning with plans devised on his dining room table in 2007.

But Wilson was effectively barred from celebrating with his students.

Several weeks earlier, he had written a blog post embracing the values of a classical education. Some younger members of his staff perceived it as racially traumatizing; others found it simply tone-deaf. He was in a kind of purgatory, still employed by Ascend but taken out of its day-to-day operation.

During graduation, he sat discreetly in the audience, far from the stage. The ceremony passed without a mention of his name. A former colleague and friend, Betsey Schmidt, approached him afterward and began to cry. He looked emaciated, fatigued, lost.

During Wilson’s tenure, Ascend had grown from a single school to a network of 15, with 800 employees and 5,500 students, 84% of them living in poverty and nearly all children of color, who were reading “The Tempest’’ and Auden and studying African masks and the Dutch masters by fifth grade.

The students also outperformed the city and statewide averages on standardized tests. More than 95% of the high school’s first senior class was graduating on time.

Early in the next school year, Ascend’s board of directors would remove Wilson — white, gay, middle-aged and widely respected in education circles — from his position over vague concerns about his management style.

What had begun as a discussion about race was now, on the face of it, a conversation about manner, conducted largely by the white people in charge of him — members of a board who would still, after everything was over, be left grappling with the question of what role white elites should ultimately play in the education of poor black and brown children.

Whatever form the culture wars took in the late 1980s and 1990s — feuds between far-right politicians and the artists whose provocations they couldn’t abide, campus debates about the value and bias of the Western canon — the bodies weren’t stacked quite so high.

You could say something ill-considered and still imagine that tomorrow someone might hand you an oxygen mask. The apparent catalyst for Wilson’s new status among the ghosts was a piece he published on the Ascend website titled “The Promise of Intellectual Joy.’’

In it, he ran through the history of U.S. education and blamed the public school system, in large part, for the country’s long descent toward anti-intellectualism. Wilson faulted progressives for a squishy leniency and conservatives for divorcing rigorous learning from any sense of excitement or fun.

While those points alone might not have set things on fire, Wilson lamented that education was now “under fresh attack, this time as ‘whiteness.’” Outlining the various ways in which disadvantaged children were further victimized by the system’s deficiencies, he made the dubious claim that civil rights leaders had worried that forcing students of color to undertake challenging academic work would only subject them to further prejudice.

A few days after the post went up, Ahmed Ahmed, then a director at Brownsville Ascend Middle School, asked the network’s board of directors to remove the piece from the website. He and others, though by no means everyone, viewed it as a skewing of history, he told me recently, feeling it also ran counter to a lot of work the Ascend schools had done.

Wilson had the post removed and apologized for upsetting anyone. A few days later, a petition organized by Ahmed and others circulated, denouncing his “white supremacist rhetoric’’ and calling for an investigation into the incident as well as training in anti-racist practices for staff members and a clear path toward healing newly exposed divisions in the community.

But even Ahmed was surprised when the board decided to simply let Wilson go. “It was not the intention,’’ he said.

The board that pushed Wilson out, which could have exiled him at any time over the years if it saw the need, was almost entirely white. After Wilson’s termination, the board also lost its only African American member at the time; Margaret Anadu, who runs the urban investment group at Goldman Sachs, resigned in protest of how Wilson had been treated.

When charter schools grow and succeed, as Ascend did, they tend to look more and more like private corporations, adopting their hierarchies and habits and acronyms and meeting-speak. Although Ascend had done a good job of maintaining a diverse staff at the student level, Wilson had done less well diversifying the ranks of his top managers.

The chief talent and financial officers who ran the network were white. The teachers and administrators in the schools, for the most part, were not. As a result, there was a cultural tension within the institution. Wilson had begun, however belatedly, to try to rectify that.

The terms of Wilson’s contract prevent him from talking publicly about his departure from Ascend. When I asked a friend how Wilson had made sense of what had happened, he said he had cycled through stages of horror, rage and grief and was now settling into a new life as a writer and fellow at a University of Washington think tank. Wilson is writing a book about the future of school reform at a moment when education is steeped in a world of radically conflicting agendas.

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Even among the devoted former colleagues and board members who spoke on his behalf, there was an acknowledgment that Wilson could be imperious, demanding, difficult and compulsively wedded to his way of doing things. How else was one to explain the results that Ascend achieved?

He himself came from a family with soaringly high standards. A graduate of Harvard, Wilson is the son of two former Harvard professors; one of them, E. Bright Wilson, was described in obituaries as one of the most distinguished physical scientists of the 20th century. Another Wilson son won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1982.

As it happened, Steven Wilson was exacting about everything. For six years, Mo Bowie was director of operations at one of Ascend’s lower schools in Brownsville, and for a good portion of that time he tried to convince his boss that the walls should be repainted in a gloss finish because they would be easier to clean. Wilson thought that the children deserved the best possible aesthetic achievable within the budget, and institutional gloss did not fit his vision.

“As infuriating as it is — as someone tasked, let’s say, with what the walls should look like,” Bowie said, “it is also just incredibly inspiring to see someone chasing excellence at every level.”

Having worked at other charter networks, Bowie, who is black, questioned all the rigid protocols charters seem drawn to. At Ascend he felt a new freedom.

I visited Ascend for the first time several years ago because it seemed singular in the charter world, a system committed to looking at children beyond their statistical value. Wilson and his staff were doing this all without the gobs of Wall Street money on which so many other charter schools relied. That was intentional. He wanted to prove that schools could enlighten children without billionaires.

Was it worth entirely discarding him for his sins — especially when those transgressions seemed to morph over time? For years, Wilson had received positive evaluations, both from superiors and subordinates, which he pointed out in a letter to the board in September. In that letter, given to me by a former board member, Wilson explained that he was writing because he had not been given a chance to sit down and make his case, and now he was being terminated “without the opportunity to improve.”

The irony of it all was that two years earlier Wilson, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and teachers who sought change at Ascend, had gotten rid of the harsh “no excuses” disciplinary model deployed by many charters. Instead, students and teachers would work through their disputes by talking things out, by exploring and explaining their motivations toward the goal of quiet resolution.

According to Matthew Clark, another former trustee, the board had a plan as late as September to reinstate Wilson. Now that the conflict was squarely about the ways in which he handled himself with his staff — his haughtiness and self-regard — Wilson had committed himself to making changes.

But the board met resistance from other network executives who reported directly to Wilson and in the end decided to fire him.

Confused and demoralized, Clark resigned.

Had the board seen a chance to get rid of an arrogant autocrat? Or did it fear looking ideologically unpalatable if it stood in support of someone it had admired for so long?

The board’s current co-chairman, Marty Linsky, is a specialist in leadership training. He too is hampered by contractual agreements and would say only that while Wilson was “brilliant’’ and “a visionary,’’ the board had “an opportunity and responsibility’’ to answer the question of what leadership would look like “for its next chapter.’’ Ascend, he added, was long past its days as “a small startup.’’

Although the board has been diversified since the events of last fall, it is hard to feel hopeful whenever a school is talked about in the language of Silicon Valley. More than most in education reform, Wilson had proved that children could succeed not purely by rote memorization and the dismal regurgitation of facts but in the style in which affluent children were learning at the city’s best and most progressive private schools. Now he was banished essentially for his certitude.

Entirely absent from the debates about Wilson’s weaknesses and merits were the voices of the families who were sending their children to Ascend. Whatever problems existed in the system were in some part the result of ever more layers of corporate stratification and remove from what was happening within the actual community.

Private schools, for all of their faults and inequities, are typically beholden to boards made up in some part of parents and alumni who have deep investments in major decisions and outcomes. What would have happened if parents of Ascend students had been given that kind of power?

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .