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

by Bettina L. Love

In his book Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through “No Excuses” Teaching, Jim Horn documents in great detail the unrelenting pressure on students to meet education benchmarks—what some KIPP school officials called the “plan of attack”—and the resulting suffering that dark families experience at charter schools. For example, when a group of fourth-grade students failed to use test-taking strategies, the leader at the school sent this email to fourth-grade teachers: We can NOT let up on them… . Any scholar who is not using the plan of attack will go to effort academy, have their parent called, and will miss electives. This is serious business, and there has to be misery felt for kids who are not doing what is expected of them.34

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 “n...

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.

KIPP’s Houston branch collected approximately $2.3 million in student fees from low-income families during the 2015–2016 school year.36 These families are now demanding their money back.

According to the Equality of Opportunity Project at Harvard University, the American dream, if there ever was one for dark people, is fading fast. Children have a 50 percent chance of earning more or the same as their parents. A half century ago, that possibility was 90 percent.

Data suggest that “for the poorest Americans, life expectancies are 6 years higher in New York than in Detroit.”37

In 2016, a group of education researchers sounded the alarm comparing charter schools to subprime mortgages.38 Subprime mortgages are high-risk mortgage loans that were common leading up to the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Banks specifically targeted Black people by issuing loans they knew they could not repay by imposing unfair and aggressive loan terms, a practice called predatory lending. This practice is one of the many reasons the housing bubble burst. Also, a high number of Black people were deceived into taking out home loans that ruined their chances of ever building wealth. Similarly, researchers point out that there is a charter school bubble growing too.

The push to open so many charter schools, when only 17 percent of them academically outperform public schools, is tied to profiting from dark suffering. Corporate school reformers prey on the suffering and hopes of dark communities, and just like the subprime-mortgages practice of predatory lending, they lack regulation and oversight. Once the charter school bubble bursts, dark communities will be left with what education researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings calls “education debt.”42

This is in alignment with what Kendi refers to as “the conjoined twins” in tying capitalism with racism. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders had the right antiracism policies... If being antiracist means being an abolitionist teacher, then it is time to support progressives who understand the right policies! Do this at all levels of government.