Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller
In a powerful follow-up to her influential We Want To Do More Than Survive, Dr. Bettina L. Love shows education — whether you have children or not, are an educator or not — as integral to social justice and true democracy. Urgent and stirring, Punished For Dreaming is a book deeply in conversation with The New Jim Crow, Caste, and Poverty By America.

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 that Reagan’s presidency ushered in a War on Black Children. 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. This book examines how decades of racist education policies have paved the way for the current structural overhaul of American schools. In this prequel to Michelle Alexander’s 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. 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.

The book, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal [Bulk, Wholesale, Quantity] ISBN# 9781250383082 in Paperback by Bettina L. Love may be ordered in bulk quantities. Minimum starts at 25 copies. Availability based on publisher status and quantity being ordered.