Punished for Dreaming
How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal
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3.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NOW A NEW YORK TIMES AND A USA TODAY BESTSELLER
WINNER, 2024 GODDARD RIVERSIDE STEPHAN RUSSO BOOK PRIZE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
FINALIST, LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE
“I am an eighties baby who grew to hate school. I never fully understood why. Until now. Until Bettina Love unapologetically and painstakingly chronicled the last forty years of education ‘reform’ in this landmark book. I hated school because it warred on me. I hated school because I loved to dream.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times bestselling author of How to be an Antiracist
In the tradition of Michelle Alexander, an unflinching reckoning with the impact of 40 years of racist public school policy on generations of Black lives
In Punished for Dreaming Dr. Bettina Love argues forcefully that Reagan’s presidency ushered in a War on Black Children, pathologizing and penalizing them in concert with the War on Drugs. New policies punished schools with policing, closure, and loss of funding in the name of reform, as white savior, egalitarian efforts increasingly allowed private interests to infiltrate the system. These changes implicated children of color, and Black children in particular, as low performing, making it all too easy to turn a blind eye to their disproportionate conviction and incarceration. Today, there is little national conversation about a structural overhaul of American schools; cosmetic changes, rooted in anti-Blackness, are now passed off as justice.
It is time to put a price tag on the miseducation of Black children. In this prequel to The New Jim Crow, Dr. Love serves up a blistering account of four decades of educational reform through the lens of the people who lived it. Punished for Dreaming lays bare the devastating effect on 25 Black Americans caught in the intersection of economic gain and racist ideology. Then, with input from leading U.S. economists, Dr. Love offers a road map for repair, arguing for reparations with transformation for all children at its core.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Love (We Want to Do More Than Survive), professor of education at Columbia University, presents an in-depth history of the U.S. education system that highlights the anti-Black nature of school reform since the 1980s. In the decade after the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling against school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, anti-Black institutional backlash devastated the country's robust community of Black educators, according to Love, who notes that 38,000 Black teachers and 90% of Black principals were forced out of their jobs. The institutional pushback against desegregation solidified during the Reagan administration, which manufactured a crisis of faith in the education system, notoriously claiming that if a foreign power had created the U.S. education system, it would amount to an act of war. This kicked off the successive waves of "reform" that characterized the next 40 years of education policy: the growth of opt-out institutions like charter schools, virtual schools, and vouchers; the encroachment of police into schools; an increased focus on testing; and other reforms that established a punitive and depersonalized educational environment for Black children. Love concludes with a chapter arguing that Black Americans are owed $56 billion for the harm done by the past 40 years of school reform, a bold assertion that will no doubt make waves in education advocacy circles. Detailed and persuasive, this is a must-read for educators.
