Bettina Love

Punished for Dreaming by Bettina L Love brings together a lot of information that is known but often scattered and couples it with personal accounts to highlight the human damage done by such policies.

Sometimes information that many of us know isn't really useful until someone brings these pieces together into a coherent whole. Anyone, especially an educator, knows the value in doing this. Bettina accomplishes this feat wonderfully here, making a compelling argument not for more reform but for a genuine rethinking of the education system. While this is presented largely because of the racial biases inherent in the current system, a rebuilding of a better system would benefit all children and, by extension, society.

Sometimes broad arguments and statistic-laden information can become both dehumanized and overbearing. Using examples from people who have experienced the ways in which the various "reforms" have done more harm than good puts a face to these statistics and arguments. I have to question the humanity of anyone who can read this and not come away with some kind of desire to make it better.

Ignore the disingenuous arguments about "better parenting," these are rationalizations for those who have extremely biased and hateful worldviews. No problem is so easily remedied and to pretend that systemic problems can be solved so easily is either an excuse for continued inequity or the sign of a truly stupid person. Or both.

Highly recommended for readers who are concerned about the state of our current education system and would like a well-researched and well-argued cohesive account.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (more)

"An educator and activist issues an urgent call for a pedagogy meant “to eradicate injustice in and outside of schools.”

Love (Educational Theory and Practice/Univ. of Georgia) opens with the premise that education “is an industry that is driven and financially backed by the realities that dark children and their families just survive.” According to the author, well-meaning volunteers for Teach for America, who spend two years in the inner city, are nothing more than “educational parasites [who] need dark children to be underserved and failing, which supports their feel-good, quick-fix, gimmicky narrative”; slogans and rubrics such as “best practices,” “grit,” and “No Excuses” are instruments of white supremacy; teachers who claim to “love all children” are often “deeply entrenched in racism, transphobia, classism, rigid ideas of gender, and Islamophobia”; and people who claim that they do not see color, “denying their students’ racial experiences, cultural heritage, and ways of resistance,” are ipso facto racist. And those are the allies; as for the enemies, well, the language is no less unsparing. Although the argument is sometimes overly strident, Love depicts incontestable realities: Public schools, particularly in poor areas and with students of color, seem designed to fail; strategies such as teaching to the test and the Common Core do little to actually teach anyone anything; and the central lesson of what passes for civic education, as the author writes, is “comply, comply, comply.” Against this she proposes a pedagogy of abolitionism—i.e., one that, among other things, fights for social justice, challenges systematic oppression, battles supremacist assumptions, and accounts for the experiences of the marginalized: “Our schools and our teaching practices…need to be torn down and replaced with our freedom dreams rooted in participatory democracy and intersectional justice.”

A useful rejoinder, half a century on, to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; controversial but deserving of a broad audience among teachers and educational policymakers." www.kirkusreviews.com… (more)

her language here is really blunt and direct and i appreciate that. some parts seemed a little too didactic, and i definitely found some parts (especially the beginning) tough and slow to get through. but there is a lot of important information here, and just the idea of reconsidering how badly we botched school integration was reason enough for me to read this book.

i can't believe i never thought of or about alternatives to the way they integrated the schools that would have benefited equality and people of color immensely. this section of the book blew my mind: "Legal scholar Derrick Bell argued that Black folk would have been better served if the court had ruled differently in Brown v. Board of Education and enforced the 'equal' part of 'separate but equal.' W.E.B. Du Bois made a similar argument in 1935; he proclaimed, 'Negro children needed neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What they need is education.'"

"...racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, classism, mass incarceration, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are protected systems that will not be dismantled because we ask; they will be dismantled because we fight, demanding what they said was impossible, remembering through the words of Angela Y. Davis that 'freedom is a constant struggle.'"

"The fact that dark people are tasked with the work of dismantling these centuries-old oppressions is a continuation of racism."

"I ask my students every year to guess the percentage of Black people in the US population. ...Guesses range from 20 to 40 percent. In reality, Black folk make up just less than 14 percent of the US population. So, if you have limited interactions with Black folk, how can you think there are so many of us? Again, Black folk are highly visible and invisible at the same time. The sad truth is that White people can spend their entire lives ignoring, dismissing, and forgetting dark peoples' existence and still be successful in life. The latter is not the same for us."

"Whiteness is also a culture; it was created by the educational, social, economic, spiritual , and political conditions that intentionally and methodically give power to racism."

"'Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as White infants - a racist disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery, when most Black women were considered chattel.'"… (more)