Punished for Dreaming

St. Martin’s Press
Hardcover
352 pages • $29.00
ISBN: 9781250280381

How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

Bettina L. Love

“Blends brilliance, warmth, and a deep commitment to the pursuit of justice for all our nation’s children.”

—Brittney Cooper, bestselling author of Eloquent Rage

In this groundbreaking prequel to The New Jim Crow, award-winning educator Dr. Bettina Love serves up a blistering account of four decades of educational reform through the lens of people who lived it. In Punished for Dreaming, Dr. Love makes the case 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, high-stakes standardized testing, loss of funding, and closure in the name of reform. All the while, white saviors’ 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 arrest, conviction, and incarceration, and the harmfulness of reform. There is little national conversation today about a structural overhaul of American schools; instead, education is awash in book and curriculum bans and the attempt to eliminate even the mention of anti-racism or equity. Dr. Love never lets us forget the profound lifetime effect of reform on individuals. She zeroes in on the powerful stories of twenty-five Black Americans, as well as her own educational experiences as a child of the eighties. Finally, she puts a price tag on the miseducation of Black children. 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.

© Tiffany Stubbs

Dr. Bettina L. Love is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College at Columbia University and the bestselling author of We Want to Do More Than Survive. In 2022, the Kennedy Center named Dr. Love one of the Next 50 leaders who are making the world more inspired, inclusive, and compassion – ate. She is a cofounder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN), whose mission is to develop and support teachers and parents fighting injustice within their schools and communities. ATN has granted more than $250,000 to abolitionists around the country. She is also a founding member of the task force that launched the program In Her Hands, distributing more than fifteen million dollars to Black women living in Georgia. Dr. Love is a sought-after public speaker, and in 2018 she was granted a resolution by Georgia’s House of Representatives for her impact on the field of education.