Punished For Dreaming

Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists. Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom—not merely reform—teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.

NOW A NEW YORK TIMES AND A USA TODAY BESTSELLER “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.

This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2013. Through ethnographically informed interviews and observations conducted with six Black middle and high school girls, Hip Hop's Li'l Sistas Speak explores how young women navigate the space of Hip Hop music and culture to form ideas concerning race, body, class, inequality, and privilege. The thriving atmosphere of Atlanta, Georgia serves as the background against which these youth consume Hip Hop, and the book examines how the city's socially conservative politics, urban gentrification, race relations, Southern-flavored Hip Hop music and culture, and booming adult entertainment industry rest in their periphery. Intertwined within the girls' exploration of Hip Hop and coming of age in Atlanta, the author shares her love for the culture, struggles of being a queer educator and a Black lesbian living and researching in the South, and reimagining Hip Hop pedagogy for urban learners.

This frank and courageous book explores the persistence of failure in today's urban schools. At its heart is the argument that most education policy discussions are disconnected from the daily realities of urban schools, especially those in poor and beleaguered neighborhoods. Charles M. Payne argues that we have failed to account fully for the weakness of the social infrastructure and the often dysfunctional organizational environments of urban schools and school systems. The result is that liberals and conservatives alike have spent a great deal of time pursuing questions of limited practical value in the effort to improve city schools. Payne carefully delineates these stubborn and intertwined sources of failure in urban school reform efforts of the past two decades. Yet while his book is unsparing in its exploration of the troubled recent history of urban school reform, Payne also describes himself as "guardedly optimistic." He describes how, in the last decade, we have developed real insights into the roots of school failure, and into how some individual schools manage to improve. He also examines recent progress in understanding how particular urban districts have established successful reforms on a larger scale. Drawing on a striking array of sources--from the recent history of various urban school systems, to the growing sophistication of education research, to his own experience as a teacher, scholar, and participant in reform efforts--Payne paints a vivid and unmistakably realistic portrait of urban schools and reforms of the past few decades. So Much Reform, So Little Change will be required reading for everyone interested in the plight--and the future--of urban schools.

“We Dare Say Love” takes up the critically important issue of what it means to educate Black male students in a large urban district. It chronicles the development and implementation of the African American Male Achievement Initiative in Oakland Unified School District, following a small group of Black male educators who changed district policy and practice to create a learning experience for Black boys rooted in love. The book takes readers inside the classrooms and inside the heads and hearts of program founders, leaders, and instructors to understand their pedagogy of care. It also elucidates the rituals, beliefs, and practices that created a classroom environment that held high expectations for the engagement and achievement of Black boys and provided a space for Black male students to blossom. “This book offers an anti-deficit, anti-essentialist perspective of Black males’ performance in schools and gives nuance to the stark realities that young men face—some thriving, some struggling, some making progress, others seeking a place to be recognized for their full human potential.” —From the Afterword by Tyrone C. Howard, professor of education, UCLA and author of Black Male(d): Peril and Promise in the Education of African American Males “Chapters capture the multiple dimensions of collaborations and partnerships required for such systemic change, one of which is a fundamental wrestling with the metanarratives in the United States and elsewhere around the Black body and in particular the Black male. We can all learn revealing lessons of struggle and victory from the chapters of this volume.” —Carol D. Lee, Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University Contributors: Baayan Bakari, Christopher P. Chatmon, Shawn Ginwright, Jarvis R. Givens, Jerome Gourdine, Gregory Hodge, Tyrone C. Howard, Jahi, Patrick Johnson, Na’ilah Suad Nasir, David Philoxene, kihana miraya ross, Maxine McKinney de Royston, Pedro A. Noguera, Sepehr Vakil

Black Appetite. White Food. invites educators to explore the nuanced manifestations of white privilege as it exists within and beyond the classroom. Renowned speaker and author Jamila Lyiscott provides ideas and tools that teachers, school leaders, and professors can use for awareness, inspiration, and action around racial injustice and inequity. Part I of the book helps you ask the hard questions, such as whether your pedagogy is more aligned with colonialism than you realize and whether you are really giving students of color a voice. Part II offers a variety of helpful strategies for analysis and reflection. Each chapter includes personal stories, frank discussions of the barriers you may face, and practical ideas that will guide you as you work to confront privilege in your classroom, campus, and beyond.

Detective Peter Decker teams up with his wife and daughter to solve a crime rooted in both the past and present. While on routine patrol, LAPD Officer Cindy Decker rescues a newborn abandoned in an alley dumpster. But she can't call it a night until she sees the infant safe in a hospital, cared for by a professional -- in this case a male nurse with soulful eyes and lots of charm. Now the hunt is on for the mother. Armed with advice from her overworked father, Detective Peter Decker, Cindy plunges into her inner-city Hollywood district, a world of helpless people and violent gangs. Pursuing each new lead batters her complex relationships and endangers her life. On one side: Decker and Decker, a brilliant but combative pair. On the other: a vicious killer ready to strike again. While on routine patrol, LAPD officer Cindy Decker rescues a newborn abandoned in an alley dumpster. Cindy searches for the mother in inner -city Hollywood, following a treacherous trail filled with drug lords. But with each new lead, the twisted journey gets darker -- and endangering her very life. When Decker and Decker join forces, can this edgy duo put personal issues aside to catch a vicious culprit before he strikes again?

Who is Paula Sims? Is she a cold-blooded baby killer-or is she the victim of an affliction so terrible it drove her to madness and murder. Trial for murder of her daughter, Heather Lee.