$16 billion for the ‘unnecessary and violent presence’ of school cops
The education professor who believes the American education system engages in the “spirit murder” of black children says the price tag for this “hurt” is more than … two trillion dollars.
The “award-winning” Bettina Love (pictured), now at Columbia University’s Teachers College, says her generation — “the Black children of the 1980s and 90s” — had to deal with “education reform merged with crime reform” that “put targets” on their backs.
Love says these education reforms include standardized tests, No Child Left Behind, school closures (presumably COVID-induced) and “book and curriculum bans.”
Politicians, police, the media and even first ladies referred to black kids as “crack babies” and “superpredators,” Love says, and these labels led to this demographic being “punished […] inside the walls of our own public schools.”
(Interestingly, it was an academic at Princeton who coined the term “superpredator” but it arguably was most famously used by Hillary Clinton in 1996 in a speech in support of the 1994 crime bill which her husband, President Bill Clinton, supported and signed into law. Also interesting is how NBC News complained that of the total 281 media mentions of “superpredator” in five years — between 1995 to 2000 — three out of five allegedly went unchallenged.)
After several anecdotes regarding the travails of black students from back in the day, Love claims schools were “never designed with [black] interests in mind.” (Her friend Zakia was “body-slammed” by a teacher and a cop threw her against a locker when she was 11 — apparently for no reason at all — and allegedly no one cared about a boy named Rob’s excessive absences when he skipped school during standardized tests. Rob also didn’t have a black male teacher throughout his 12 years at school.)
“Instead of creating better learning conditions for Black children,” she says, “school reforms punish us for being Black.”
To believe Love one also must believe educators (some of the most politically progressive people in the country) and Democratic politicians were (are) out to get black kids merely because of their skin color.
And for this, Love, with the help of “a team of economists and policy experts,” breaks down how the $2 trillion in reparations should be spent:
— $1.1 billion for “being excluded from enriching curriculum.”
— $16 billion for the “unnecessary and violent presence” of SROs — school resource officers (cops).
— $6 billion for “unjust” (out-of-school) suspensions.
— $33 for “dilapidated buildings that are detrimental to [students’] well-being.”
— between $1.4 trillion and $1.9 trillion respectively for “earnings losses” due to education reforms and “pushout” (presumably suspensions and the like) and lack of black teachers.
Like so many other educationists who target the pallid patriarchy to make a buck, Love makes no mention of the epidemic of fatherlessness in the demographic in question, nor other considerations such as it being considered “uncool” to get good grades.
Then there’s the fact that replacements for school suspensions like “restorative practices/justice” have proven miserable failures. Student discipline is becoming a thing of the past, if it isn’t already. Even reprimanding a student can lead to accusations of “cultural incompetence” … or worse.
What would Love say about (the many) black parents who want their children in orderly classrooms, who don’t care about the race of the teacher (just that he/she is competent and knowledgable) and don’t see occasional testing as racially discriminatory?
According to her faculty page, Love is “a sought-after public speaker on a range of topics, including abolitionist teaching, education reform, anti-racism, Hip Hop education, Black girlhood, queer youth, educational reparations [and] Hip Hop feminism.”
Her new book “Punished for Dreaming” has received accolades from academics such as Ibram Kendi, Brittney Cooper and Michael Eric Dyson.
MORE: Bettina Love: White teachers need anti-racist ‘therapy’
IMAGE: Bettina Love/Twitter
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