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”.
