Should Black students be paid reparations for decades of educational mistreatment? In her new book, Punished for Dreaming, the education scholar Bettina Love argues a forceful yes – and estimates the harm to Black students by the US education system could amount to as much as $2tn over the last 40 years.
That damage, Love says, was not only dealt by uncaring educators such as the high school math teacher who bluntly told her, “you are not college material,” or the elementary school teacher who body-slammed her friend Zook and put her in a chokehold when she was just 11. The harm also came from an alliance of policymakers, philanthropists and entrepreneurs who created the conditions for this neglect – by defunding public schools in order to push self-enriching “reforms”.
I spoke with Love about what educational reparations could actually look like – and why it requires calling out the “super predators” responsible for the damage, from the economist Milton Friedman to the former president Barack Obama.
One of the key arguments in your book is that the US owes Black students reparations. You write that reparations are “an affirmation, pure and simple, that Black Lives Matter, harm has been done to those lives, we are owed compensation for that harm”. Can you describe the logic in a nutshell?
If I’m going to a dilapidated school where I have teachers that don’t look like me, if I have teachers who are not even qualified to teach me, if I am over-policed and pushed out, how am I supposed to learn? When I don’t learn, you are now impacting the life that I am going to have. Am I going to have healthcare? Am I going to have a job that is going to ensure that I can provide for my family? Are you pushing me out right into the criminal punishment system? If we believe that harm is being done, that we should repair it – we need educational reparations.
To actually quantify the last 40 years of harm, I worked with [the policy expert] Hope Wollensack, [the education professor] Shanyce Campbell, and [the economist] Nzinga Broussard. Those three amazing Black women came to my house, and it was like Hidden Figures – they were charting stuff, coming up with formulas. We tallied $1.5 to $2tn, much of which represents the lifetime earnings lost due to racist educational policies.
You call the people responsible for these harms “super predators” – an infamous phrase originally coined by conservatives in the 1990s to describe supposedly criminal young people of color.
I really wanted to be clear about that term, because it was used in a way that took so many Black children’s childhoods away from them. Education reform merged with crime reform to pretty much dispose of us.
When I look back to my time in school now, as a researcher – oh my God, it was so carceral. There were sentries everywhere. We were confined. We were suspended. I saw students be brutalized, I saw students being punished. I saw students be victimized and attacked by the very people who were supposed to love them and take care of them and be there for them.
The real predators are the ones who profit off of ensuring that we don’t get an education that we deserve. I’m not just calling out Republicans, I’m calling out each and every administration for the last 40 years, whose policies have been harmful to Black children. And the thinktanks, the rich families, the foundations, who are all in some way ensuring that public education is being devalued. For them it has always been about, how do we privatize education? How do we destroy this public thing? And now we’re watching it being dismantled.
You name economists such as James Buchanan and Milton Friedman, who opposed school integration efforts, and billionaires like the Koch brothers and Bill and Melinda Gates for fueling the charter school movement. You also name Barack Obama – why?
I thought it was important. We have to talk about his legacy in its totality. And when it comes to education, Barack Obama’s legacy needs to be questioned. When you think about how he allowed Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation to pretty much run the Department of Education, when we think about Common Core, where’s that now? Nowhere to be found. When you think about the “merit pay” initiative that he had, when we think about the Race to the Top and its $4bn, what happened? What did we get from that? And you have the Atlanta cheating scandal where teachers were indicted and went to prison. Some of those teachers didn’t do anything. Some of them did cheat, and I’m not condoning what they did, but is incarceration the answer? This was all under Obama’s watch, and so we’ve got to be critical.
A lot of the people you’re calling super predators would call themselves reformers. Are “good” reforms possible?
When you hear the word reform, you believe that somebody’s gonna fix it. But we really, if we think deeply and pull back the layer, the system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly the way it was designed to. There is a lucrative industry to make sure public schools don’t do well. The predators not only make money from it, they ensure that it happens over and over and over again.
People are calling themselves educational entrepreneurs, with no experience, no understanding of education. You have a very good slide deck you’re experimenting on Black children, somewhere you would never send your children. And so here it’s similar to the prison industrial complex, where there are individuals who are profiting off of our demise. They say they’re addressing our failure, but really they are creating a system designed for us to fail.
When you try to reform a system like that, you just tinker with the edges of injustice, and then you call it justice. We’ve done that with criminal justice reform, welfare reform, immigration reform: we haven’t actually fixed anything, because we don’t want to actually get to the root of the injustice.
So what is the root of it, in your view?
It’s both white supremacy and capitalism – those things are embedded within the American psyche. The massive resistance to [the supreme court’s 1954 decision to integrate public schools] Brown v Board of Education created what I call educational white rage. We saw a group of really wealthy people get together and say the Brown decision went too far, and get really organized. By the time Reagan took office, they were a well-oiled machine. They had thinktanks and non-profits and media conglomerates. They understood how to create policies and reforms that upheld racism and hoarded resources away from Black children.
In the back of all of that is the “war on drugs”, “zero tolerance”, the “broken windows” theory, “three strikes” – you start to see that type of language morphed into school policy. What I argue in the book is that they were intentionally creating chaos: to tell the American public that this institution can’t be trusted anymore. That’s intentional, because they want to privatize this public entity. They see it as a slush fund of money.
What about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives? Could we think of these programs as a partial but worthwhile reform?
I don’t want to just throw it out. But I’ve interviewed so many DEI professionals around the country. And the first thing that they will say is: “This position was created as a response to some type of racism in our country, or in our school district.” Now that one person is somehow supposed to fix all the issues in the school district? They don’t have any staff. They don’t have any funding, and they don’t have any power. So how are you going to create equity? So DEI becomes just another space where racism is functioning, deeply invested in, but gets to hide under the cloak of these justice words.
So what do educational reparations actually look like to you? Can sending out checks fix what you’re describing as a predatory system?
I want the system to change. I want great schools. I want teachers to make beyond a living wage, to actually be paid $100,000 – $120,000 a year. I want a rich and thoughtful curriculum. I want schools to make sure all students – neurodivergent, no matter how they show up – are being treated with love and kindness, and that we find ways to educate them to their highest potential. I also want parents to feel empowered. As a parent, when you know that an institution owes you, it’s a really powerful thing.
I also want to further this research. It’s only a blueprint. I paid for this out of my pocket; I didn’t have the backing of a thinktank. I don’t think that $2tn number is the be-all and end-all; that is what four Black women calculated in my basement. I know the number is greater than that. And that’s just Black folks. I want to get to everybody.
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Bettina Love’s book Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal will be published by Macmillan on 12 September
