Punished For Dreaming

Well, fam, I hope you're having a super three day weekend. I just got back from camp where Eugene did all the work, leaving me free to sit on the porch in a rocking chair and read. It as a good thing I packed plenty of books because I read almost all of them. They were all winners. And now that I'm back to my on the grid home I can share them with you.
I was a parent and a school board member when no child was left behind while we were racing to the top. I was no fan of the presidentially mandated school deforms. And no, that was not a misspelling. It was a total nightmare. The schools were spending way too much time teaching to the standardized tests. Governor LePage was ranking, rewarding, and punishing schools based on the scores, conveniently forgetting (if he ever grasped the concept) that they correlate with student socioeconomic status rather teaching efficacy. Some school administrators and teachers were crossing ethical and legal lines by fixing student scores. And my peers seemed blind to the elephant in the room, the total wrongness of what was going down, as long as we were safely far enough from the bottom to not get penalized.
But even I did not realize the true depths of the evil going on until I read Dr. Bettina L. Love's Punished For Dreaming. Dr. Love is a Columbia University professor and the author of We Want To Do More Than Survive (which is now on my inter library loan borrowing list). She was named one of the Next 50 leaders who are making the world more inspired, inclusive, and compassionate in 2022 by the Kennedy Center. But before all that success she was a Black teen who was routed into shop classes and told that she was not college material when she tried to get help preparing to take the SATs. And she succeeded despite, not because of the public education system. She's one of countless Black kids whose dreams and ambitions were considered acceptable sacrifices during four decades of educational "reform".
Dr. Love traces all that mess to blinding white rage kindled by Brown v. Board of education in which the Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, a prior ruling that upheld the separate but equal idea. The schools were separate all right, but anything but equal. When the robed gang said enough already a lot of whites got to raging. (And not just in the South. I personally witnessed whites in Boston screaming, swearing, and throwing stones at terrified Black children.). Some found shutting the school system down preferable to having their children in classes with Black peers. And when the robed gang followed their school integration order with one to hurry up already those whites were up In arms.
"White supremacists did not simply resist school integration—they built a profitable educational enterprise rooted in the exploitation of Black people's pursuit of education that has led to 'skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment' This is the afterlife of Brown putting Black children at risk."
Dr. Love vividly describes the many evil forms this afterlife takes place. If you stick with the book, you will learn a lot about subjects such as the school to prison pipeline; the undermining of public schools by charter schools, movements like Teach Across America, and entrepreneurs; the damage done by standardized tests; and why the currently popular diversity, equity, and inclusion may be a trap. You will also learn why reform reform will never be sufficient and nothing less than abolition (accompanied by reparations) will set things straight.
If you're an educator, a school administrator, or a concerned parent you'd do well to put Punished For Dreaming on your summer reading list.
On a purrrsonal note, if you're plagued with mosquitoes as Eugene and I were up at camp you might want to try the old fashioned remedy we tried—a citronella candle we bought at a hardware store. It cut down considerably on the winged blood suckers while smelling quite pleasant.
A great big shout out goes out to all the other campers who spent the weekend in the great outdoors.