Bettina L. Love

Punished for Dreaming argues that forty years of American school reform, from A Nation at Risk through No Child Left Behind and the charter movement, did measurable harm to Black children, and that the harm was a policy outcome rather than an accident. Bettina L. Love reports it through interviews with people who were pupils across those decades, and closes by putting a figure on what she thinks is owed. St. Martin's Press published it in 2023. Love holds the William F. Russell Professorship at Teachers College, Columbia University, and taught at Georgia before that. She co-founded the Abolitionist Teaching Network. Her earlier book We Want to Do More Than Survive sets out abolitionist teaching, an approach critics on the right treat as activism wearing a curriculum, and which she defends as naming conditions teachers already work inside. The reparations argument at the end is where reviewers divided most sharply.