Repairing Decades of Racist School Reforms - YES! Magazine Solutions Journalism

Oct 13, 2023

In 1983, an educational commission that was formed under President Ronald Reagan released a 35-page report called A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. This report laid the groundwork for decades of reforms, many of which remain in place today.

In a new book, Bettina Love, Ph.D., lays out how “a thirty-five-page educational report manufactured an educational crisis of catastrophic proportions that destroyed generations of Black families”—a crisis that combined the educational industry with the prison industry. To remedy the harm, Love calls for the implementation of “educational reparations.”

Love, who is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about her new book Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal.

Sonali Kolhatkar is currently the racial justice editor at YES! Media and a writing fellow with Independent Media Institute. She was previously a weekly columnist for Truthdig.com. She is also the host and creator of Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. Sonali won First Place at the Los Angeles Press Club Annual Awards for Best Election Commentary in 2016. She also won numerous awards including Best TV Anchor from the LA Press Club and has also been nominated as Best Radio Anchor 4 years in a row. She is the author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence, and the co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women's Mission. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights, 2023). She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. She reflects on her professional path in her 2014 TEDx talk, “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host.” She can be reached at sonalikolhatkar.com