We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

by Bettina L. Love

Dark children at KIPP cannot fail, cannot express their stress, cannot feel pain from a world that rejects them, and cannot make mistakes, one of the critical and necessary experiences of childhood. The “no excuses” model is just another form of zero tolerance. These schools function to feed the school-to-prison pipeline that targets dark children. In March 2016, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA released data from one of the largest studies ever to research school discipline records, involving more than 5,250 charter schools.35 The study found that charter schools suspend Black students and students with disabilities at highly disproportionate rates compared with White and nondisabled students. For example, the study reported that five hundred charter schools suspended Black students at a rate of 10 percentage points higher than their White peers. This has a direct impact on children’s futures, as extensive research demonstrates that high suspension rates are part of the school-to-prison pipeline. Again, it’s another way in which the educational survival complex and the prison-industrial complex are tied together to profit from dark suffering.