Punished for Dreaming Quotes

“I realized I could not serve two masters. I could not serve the children and the system. The system was not about helping children; it was about helping the system. If you are a part of the system, by default, you are helping to maintain the system.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“Curriculum is one of the most powerful tools in education to teach all children that people like them and people from whom they are different are beautiful, powerful, and valuable, and so were their ancestors.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“The “reform” movement is really a “corporate reform” movement, funded to a large degree by the major foundations, Wall Street hedge managers, entrepreneurs, and the U.S. Department of Education.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“After 1983, education no longer had time for critical-thinking skills, civics education for a better world, teacher-student relationships, or divergent thinking.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“A common thread exists between the civil rights era... and today... Then as now, school choice relies on Black resiliency, Black ambition, and Black people's relentless pursuit of education to create the facade that our children have choices in life to mitigate racism and anti-Blackness...”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“Abolitionists like myself want all human beings to have everything they need to feel whole, supported, cared for, and to live in communities that hold people accountable for harm without creating more harm or violence.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“White communities want neighborhood schools if their neighborhood school is white. If their neighborhood school is black, they want choice.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“Reformers will highlight one or two Joes a year, while thousands of Joes are left behind because they have to be extraordinary to be White ordinary.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“School choice promised to allow parents, irrespective of race, to choose outside of their zoned public school in the interest of their children’s education, while in reality, that choice was fraught at best and damaging at worst. Money that would have gone to making local public schools more equal and more viable for Black children was made available for transfer to already more privileged White schools.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“Our sacrifices are celebrated as America's watershed moments for the appearance of civil rights, but once the cameras leave, we are met with resistance in the court-- and legislation often quietly unravels the gains of our sacrifices. We are expected to be America's moral conscience, and we are unceremoniously punished for it.... We need schools that understand, affirm, and love Black people for more than just the month of February... Schools that confront the legacy and continued existence of racism in schooling head-on... Schools that center Black people's contributions, not just their oppressions... This is the type of education that reform can't provide.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“As I write this, the Koch brothers, along with the Manhattan Institute, the Bradley Foundation, and America First Legal are financing the attack on racial and queer justice in education by lying to the American public that critical race theory (CRT) is being taught in our nation’s schools and drag queens are grooming children. The Koch brothers don’t simply aim their wealth at model legislation and shifting public perceptions. They also attempt to directly influence electoral results by financing right-wing candidates and movements like the Tea Party.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is White people have a very, very serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they are going to do about it. Take me out of it. —Toni Morrison1”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“Under these conditions, the promise of equity is ultimately hollow because White people can use the language of justice while remaining deeply committed and invested in Whiteness—thereby devaluing the work of DEI as a “symbolic commitment.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“Like many others I interviewed for this book, Rob did not have a single connection with a teacher while attending public school for thirteen years.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“As iconic scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis tells us, prisons serve as “a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent.”43”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“When we speak we are afraid / our words will not be heard / nor welcomed / but when we are silent / we are still afraid / so it is better to speak.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“In 1995, as governor of Texas, Bush revamped education in the state with Senate Bill 1. Running for governor, he promised more charter schools, more accountability, and more money for school vouchers. The goal of Bush’s model was for school districts to abandon state regulations and create competition among schools that demonstrated high standardized test scores. Charter schools would be the incubator of this competition. Senate Bill 1 also replaced the traditional school governance model with a corporate structure that stripped most managerial and regulatory power away from the state board of education.46”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“but I had the love of my community, the love of my friends, and a sense of identity.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“the corporate takeover of public education relies on “market-driven logic that privileges economic efficiency and individual success over collective justice.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“Crack: Cocaine, Corruption, and Conspiracy tells the story of how U.S. officials turned a blind eye to drug traffickers who were funneling cocaine from Central and South America to inner-city Black neighborhoods in the United States.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“As the scholar Jean Anyon astutely observed, “As a nation, we have been counting on education to solve the problems of unemployment, joblessness, and poverty for many years. But education did not cause these problems, and education cannot solve them.”18”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“They referred to our educational experience as the achievement gap, which was another way to say we would never be as smart as White children.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“The government told Black parents that no child would be left behind, but they did not specify who would be taking their children—the testing industry, the prisons, or the punitive charter schools, which all too often only concerned themselves with teaching Black children the basic skills for America’s low-skill labor demands.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“Reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I saw how much books helped transform his life. “I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity,” Malcolm wrote, and I felt the same way.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

“Brown incited a loosely coordinated but tightly aligned attack on public education by the right, the far right, White liberals in the North, poor White folx, and the ultrarich. Ironically, Brown marks the formal beginning of an anti-Black educational agenda that would become the norm by the 1980s and 1990s.”
― Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal