School is back in session but is the American school system working for the nation’s children? Educational reform has been a long-standing issue (and will continue to be in the years to come). Leading professors, education journalists, cultural critics, and more weigh in on the current state of affairs in the United States school system.
by Dr. Bettina Love
In Punished for Dreaming, Dr. Bettina Love presents an unflinching reckoning with the impact of 40 years of racist public school policy on generations of Black lives. During Regan’s presidency, 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. 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.
by Natalie Wexler
It was only after years within the education reform movement that Natalie Wexler stumbled across a hidden explanation for our country’s frustrating lack of progress when it comes to providing every child with a quality education. The problem wasn’t one of the usual scapegoats: lazy teachers, shoddy facilities, lack of accountability. It was something no one was talking about: the elementary school curriculum’s intense focus on decontextualized reading comprehension “skills” at the expense of actual knowledge. In The Knowledge Gap, Wexler brings together history, research, and compelling characters to pull back the curtain on this fundamental flaw in our education system – one that fellow reformers, journalists, and policymakers have long overlooked, and of which the general public, including many parents, remains unaware.
by Jonathan Kozol
In 1988, Jonathan Kozol set off to spend time with children in the American public education system. For two years, he visited schools in neighborhoods across the country, from Illinois to Washington, D.C., and from New York to San Antonio. He spoke with teachers, principals, superintendents, and, most important, children. What he found was devastating. Not only were schools for rich and poor blatantly unequal, the gulf between the two extremes was widening—and it has widened since. The urban schools he visited were overcrowded and understaffed, and lacked the basic elements of learning—including books and, all too often, classrooms for the students. In Savage Inequalities, Kozol delivers a searing examination of the extremes of wealth and poverty and calls into question the reality of equal opportunity in our nation’s schools.
by bell hooks
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks—writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual—writes about a new kind of education, educations as the practice of freedom. Bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise critical questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.
