Remembering Sol Stern

We’re sad to hear of the passing of Sol Stern (1935–2025), whose incisive writing on education for City Journal helped shape New York City’s reform movement. As a longtime contributor to the magazine and author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice, he advocated rigorous curricula, school choice, and accountability in public schools. We remain committed to the cause he championed: ensuring every child has access to a strong education rooted in high expectations, sound pedagogy, and genuine opportunity.

Stern’s intellectual journey was as remarkable as his prose. He began as a man of the radical Left, writing for Ramparts magazine in the 1960s, where he played a central role in exposing the CIA’s covert funding of cultural organizations—a major moment in Cold War journalism. But over time, disillusioned with the failures of progressive ideology, he moved rightward, eventually joining City Journal in the 1990s.

Here, under editor Myron Magnet, Sol became one of the country’s sharpest critics of education orthodoxy, taking aim at politicized pedagogy, content-free curricula, and the destructive influence of Paulo Freire, Lucy Calkins, and other so-called educators. At the same time, he wrote passionately in support of Catholic schools as a vital refuge for disadvantaged kids in failing public systems. “Unlike the public schools, which have trivialized their curriculum and abandoned their standards in the name of multiculturalism,” Sol observed, “Catholic educators have remained committed to the ideal that minority children can share in, and master, our civilization’s intellectual and spiritual heritage. Indeed, Catholic schools are among the last bastions in American education of the idea of a common civic culture.” His reporting brought readers inside classrooms, and forcefully made the case, again and again, that education reform was the civil rights struggle of our time. 

As part of that struggle, Sol embraced the work of E. D. Hirsch, whom he called “the most important education reformer of the past half-century.” Hirsch’s ideal of “cultural literacy” was exactly what today’s public schools didn’t seek to convey; instead, under the sway of progressive education theory, they followed an approach in which students could “construct their own knowledge.” The devastating consequence of such anti-literacy pedagogy, Sol maintained, was that it “widened, rather than reduced, the gap in intellectual capital between middle-class children and those from disadvantaged families.” Sol broadly supported school choice, but he came to believe that its backers paid insufficient attention to the content of classroom instruction. 

Apart from his education writing, Sol was a consistent defender of Israel and relentless critic of anti-Semitism for the magazine, writing remarkable essays over the years on Tel Aviv, the Nakba, Hannah Arendt, and more. 

Sol retained the fierce polemical energy of his Ramparts days to the end. Like many with intellectual roots on the left, he could absolutize political and cultural differences into black-and-white moral judgments. In his later years, after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, he publicly broke with City Journal and longtime friends like the late David Horowitz, his former Ramparts colleague-turned-conservative. Though we differed with his political conclusions (and, needless to say, his criticisms of the Manhattan Institute and City Journal), we remain indebted to his contributions to the magazine, and we extend our condolences to his family and friends. Sol Stern was truly one of a kind. 

Photo: Manhattan Institute