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

by Bettina L. Love

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

In a powerful follow-up to her bestselling, 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 as issues of poverty, housing, healthcare and policing. Urgent and stirring, Punished For Dreaming is a book deeply in conversation with The New Jim Crow, White Rage, Caste, and Poverty By America.

NOW A NEW YORK TIMES AND A USA TODAY BESTSELLER

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

A New York Times bestseller, an unflinching reckoning with the impact 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.

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. Punished for Dreaming lays bare the devastating effect on 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250383082
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/22/2025
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Dr. Bettina L. Love is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the acclaimed author of We Want to Do More Than Survive and Punished for Dreaming, a New York Times bestseller. This groundbreaking work led to her being awarded the prestigious Stowe Prize for Literary Activism and being named a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. In 2022, the Kennedy Center named her one of the world’s Next 50 Leaders. She is a co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network and a sought-after public speaker on topics such as abolitionist teaching, educational reparations, and anti-racism. Her writings have appeared in various news outlets, including The Daily Beast, Time, Education Week, The Guardian, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Additionally, she was instrumental in founding the Task Force behind the groundbreaking "In Her Hands" program, which is disbursing more than $13 million to support Black women in Georgia. She was granted a resolution by Georgia's House of Representatives for her impact on education in 2018.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/07/2023

Love (We Want to Do More Than Survive), professor of education at Columbia University, presents an in-depth history of the U.S. education system that highlights the anti-Black nature of school reform since the 1980s. In the decade after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling against school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, anti-Black institutional backlash devastated the country’s robust community of Black educators, according to Love, who notes that 38,000 Black teachers and 90% of Black principals were forced out of their jobs. The institutional pushback against desegregation solidified during the Reagan administration, which manufactured a crisis of faith in the education system, notoriously claiming that if a foreign power had created the U.S. education system, it would amount to an act of war. This kicked off the successive waves of “reform” that characterized the next 40 years of education policy: the growth of opt-out institutions like charter schools, virtual schools, and vouchers; the encroachment of police into schools; an increased focus on testing; and other reforms that established a punitive and depersonalized educational environment for Black children. Love concludes with a chapter arguing that Black Americans are owed $56 billion for the harm done by the past 40 years of school reform, a bold assertion that will no doubt make waves in education advocacy circles. Detailed and persuasive, this is a must-read for educators. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

WINNER, 10TH STOWE PRIZE FOR LITERARY ACTIVISM

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“Detailed and persuasive, this is a must-read for educators.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Lays out the racial injustices rampant in the public education system, from the era of school segregation to the massive resistance to Brown v. Board to the current era of so-called school choice. … an important—though enraging and heartbreaking—read.”

—Booklist

"A stark critique of 40 years of education policies that were deliberately crafted ‘to punish Black people for believing in and fighting for their right to quality public education.’ … An impassioned plea for educational justice.”

―Kirkus Reviews

“A landmark book.”

―Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to be an Antiracist

“Brilliant."

―Carol Anderson, bestselling author of White Rage

"Love is one of our fiercest advocates."

―Michael Eric Dyson, bestselling author

"An urgent call to action."

―Salamishah Tillet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"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

"Accessible and deeply personal...Love's interviews with Black folks... add a tenderness and intimacy."

―Eve L. Ewing, author of Ghosts in the Schoolyard

"Love brilliantly exposes how the promise of education as a means to lift all boats and right historical wrongs is coopted by politics, strategies, euphemisms, and implicit biases that surveil and control children of color under the guise of teaching them. This is an urgent, often surprising, ultimately must-read book for anyone concerned with the pedagogy in and of our nation."

―Jonathan Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness

From the Publisher

★ 10/13/2023

Impactful educator Love (We Want To Do More Than Survive) asserts that educational policies punish children of color, especially Black ones, by denying them an equitable public education. Her research shows that by the l980s and l990s, a few powerful business owners and philanthropists in the United States initiated, emphasized, and repeated a false narrative that Black children were lawless, a waste of taxpayers' money, and a danger to society. The author says that instead of reform, the victory of desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education was unevenly applied and resulted in the job eliminations of more than 38,000 Black teachers and many Black principals. The No Child Left Behind Act, designed to improve math and reading test scores of Black and Brown students, resulted in teachers spending their time teaching tests, but scores didn't improve. Love says that unless society strongly and persistently demands a large and effective structural change to the educational system, students of color will remain undereducated for the foreseeable future. Yet her book serves as an exceptional roadmap to healing and transformation. VERDICT For general readers who want to learn about and possibly improve racial problems within the education system.—Claude Ury

Library Journal

2023-06-20
An uncompromising indictment of education reform.

Educator Love, co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network, expands on her previous book, We Want To Do More Than Survive, to offer a stark critique of 40 years of education policies that were deliberately crafted “to punish Black people for believing in and fighting for their right to quality public education.” Why, she asks, “instead of learning,” are Black students “punished with low expectations, physical violence, surveillance, standardized testing, and frequent suspensions?” The author condemns education reform under Nixon, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton for enacting an agenda “that ushered in a new sort of Black bondage, a system in which Black Americans would be educationally neglected, economically starved, denied assistance, and incarcerated for selling drugs that the government itself allowed to be put out on the street.” Such policies, she asserts, are a form of white rage, “organized, well-funded, and cruel.” Policymakers with superficially progressive ideas—Bill and Melinda Gates, Mike Bloomberg, and Barack Obama, for example—nevertheless perpetrate harmful educational practices such as charter schools, virtual schools, and vouchers. “Many charter schools,” Love asserts, “are awash in corporate sponsors, philanthropic dollars, and the expectation that failure is an important part of the entrepreneurial process.” Love faults George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy, which emphasized standardized testing and graded schools on test scores. “I worked at an F school in Florida,” she writes, a depressing experience for both teachers and students. Love calls for supporting abolitionists in their fight for “healing justice, environmental justice, disability justice, health justice, immigrant justice, reproductive justice, economic justice, body justice, gender justice, and LGBTQI justice.” She advocates, as well, for reparations that would go beyond economic restitution to include funding “well-resourced state-of-the-art schools with curricula that honor different cultures and traditions with love and admiration.”

An impassioned plea for educational justice.

Kirkus Reviews