Dr. Bettina Love on Tour

Monday, Sept. 18, 6 p.m.
Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, 104 17th Ave. S.

Dr. Love talks with Jesse Hagopian about her new book, Punished For Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal, an unflinching reckoning with the impact of 40 years of racist public-school policy on generations of Black lives.

In 1983, the Reagan administration published "A Nation At Risk," a report that solidified the idea that American public schools were falling behind the standards of other western countries. In response, the next four decades would see public schools implement and then teach to standardized tests; private interests increasingly allowed to infiltrate the educational system through charter schools, No Child Left Behind, and waivers; merge the War on Drugs with the war on Black children; and increase racial, ethnic and class stratification within schools and between school districts.

In Punished For Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal, (St. Martin’s Press; on sale September 12, 2023) Bettina L. Love shows how these changes implicated children of color and Black children, in particular, as low performing and criminally minded; they were scapegoated as the cause of America’s decline in global dominance. It became easy to turn a blind eye to the disproportionate conviction and incarceration of Black minors and young adults. The system became a set-up to set them up.

Watch the trailer.

Admission is free and advance registration is encouraged.

For more information, contact Carolyn Burroughs at cburroughs@seattleu.edu.