Summary of Punished for Dreaming By Bettina L. Love: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

By Willie M. Joseph

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Summary of Punished for Dreaming By Bettina L. Love: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

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Punished for Dreaming is a landmark book by Bettina Love, chronicling the last forty years of education reform. Love argues that Reagan's presidency led to a War on Black Children, penalizing them with policing, closure, and loss of funding. These changes implicated children of color, particularly Black children, as low-performing, making it easy to ignore their disproportionate conviction and incarceration. Love calls for a structural overhaul of American schools, arguing for reparations with transformation for all children at its core. The book is a prequel to The New Jim Crow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Sep 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223701095

Willie M. Joseph

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INTRODUCTION

The author grew up in Rochester, New York during the 1980s and 1990s, where they met Zakia, a gifted basketball star. She recalls not having any supportive teachers or academic encouragement throughout her schooling. Zook was a gifted athlete but faced numerous suspensions and rumors of cheating, leading to her expulsion from the team.

The author, who was inspired by Zook, wanted to emulate her success and become a college basketball player. However, she was not prepared for the challenges that came with playing college basketball. She was enrolled in shop class and never took Advanced Placement or high-level math courses. When it was time to take the SAT, she was rejected by Mrs. Van, a Black woman who taught math at her high school.

To help her improve her SAT scores, the author found another math teacher, Ms. Nix, who attended many after-school events and coached girls' volleyball. She also connected with a woman who offered SAT tutoring to athletes for five dollars a class. After four tries and countless hours of tutoring, the author scored a 720, the exact number needed to be eligible to play college basketball.

The author's experience highlights the importance of understanding and addressing systemic violence in education, as well as the struggles faced by Black students during the 1980s and 90s. By doing so, readers can better navigate the challenges they face and achieve their goals.

Zook, a star athlete from Upstate New York, was expelled from her high school and sent to an alternative high school. Despite her struggles, she persevered and worked towards her GED. In 1997, they both started college, and Zook excelled athletically and academically at a historically Black college. The story of their experiences is similar to millions of Black students in the United States.

The author's story also highlights the perils of being on a non-academic track in a racist public school system. After graduating high school, the author realized she needed a plan beyond basketball and decided to change her major to education. She was placed in classes for recreation and leisure, which was not college-level courses. Her athletic advisor, Mr. Robert, asked her if she could change her major to education, but she was told she was only here to play basketball.

The author felt punished for believing she could be more than an athlete and called her high school athletic director, Mrs. Judy Knight, to tell her she had to leave ODU. At the end of her sophomore year, she withdrew from ODU and returned to Rochester. Mrs. Knight interviewed the head women's basketball coach at the University of Pittsburgh, who told her that she was a student first and an athlete second.

Both stories highlight the struggles faced by Black students in the United States and the importance of addressing the injustices they face in their education.

The author discusses the impact of the Reagan administration's report on American education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, on young Black people. The report highlighted the systemic failure of American schools to provide adequate education and the emphasis on reform as a solution. It also led to the merging of prisons and schools under the guise of getting tough on education, which was a euphemism for punishment, sold to the public as high-stakes testing, school choice, vouchers, charter schools, and school safety.

The author argues that Reagan's presidency ushered in a new type of American Black bondage, the War on Black Children, in which his war on drugs worked in concert with school reform to pathologize and penalize Black children under school safety policies. Schools became spaces of surveillance, confinement, and state-sanctioned violence to Black bodies, with schools becoming part of the police state resembling prisons.

The author defines this phenomenon as the exploitation of compulsory education by the everexpanding carceral state, private corporations, wealth managers, philanthropy, education reformers, local and state politicians, celebrities, real estate, the testing industry, and each U.S. president to fill school buildings with Black children who are educated to make profits for the über-rich and to undo America's democracy.

The author argues that the conjoining of schools and prisons is not a conspiracy theory but a well-executed plan that has taken the lives of Black children with surgical precision for the last forty years. White supremacy and capitalism work in unison, even in education, as a deliberate, massive, intentional, and profitable mechanism for the educational death of Black children.

Punished for Dreaming is a book that tells the story of the past forty years of education reform, which deliberately crafted policies