Steven Wilson

Steven F. Wilson is a senior fellow at Pioneer Institute. An education entrepreneur, policymaker, and writer, Wilson founded and built Ascend Learning, a network of tuition-free, liberal arts charter schools in Central Brooklyn. The Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University identified Ascend as a “gap-busting” network for its success in closing—and reversing—achievement gaps of race and income. His most recent venture, the National Summer School Initiative, provides accelerated instruction in the wake of the pandemic to 150,000 urban students. Previously, Wilson was a senior fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He was the founder and CEO of Advantage Schools, an urban school management company; an executive vice president of Edison Schools; and board president of Building Excellent Schools, a national training program for aspiring charter school founders. As special assistant for strategic planning for Massachusetts Governor William Weld, Wilson helped shape the state’s landmark 1993 Education Reform Act that made Massachusetts schools the highest performing in the country. 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. His new book, The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America, was published this year. Writing in the Harvard education journal Education Next, Helen Baxendale called The Lost Decade “an erudite and unflinching account of the damage done to America’s schools by the social justice delusions of recent times.”