Just wish there were more strategies for how to change my teaching practices. ( )

"An educator and activist issues an urgent call for a pedagogy meant “to eradicate injustice in and outside of schools.”

Love (Educational Theory and Practice/Univ. of Georgia) opens with the premise that education “is an industry that is driven and financially backed by the realities that dark children and their families just survive.” According to the author, well-meaning volunteers for Teach for America, who spend two years in the inner city, are nothing more than “educational parasites [who] need dark children to be underserved and failing, which supports their feel-good, quick-fix, gimmicky narrative”; slogans and rubrics such as “best practices,” “grit,” and “No Excuses” are instruments of white supremacy; teachers who claim to “love all children” are often “deeply entrenched in racism, transphobia, classism, rigid ideas of gender, and Islamophobia”; and people who claim that they do not see color, “denying their students’ racial experiences, cultural heritage, and ways of resistance,” are ipso facto racist. And those are the allies; as for the enemies, well, the language is no less unsparing. Although the argument is sometimes overly strident, Love depicts incontestable realities: Public schools, particularly in poor areas and with students of color, seem designed to fail; strategies such as teaching to the test and the Common Core do little to actually teach anyone anything; and the central lesson of what passes for civic education, as the author writes, is “comply, comply, comply.” Against this she proposes a pedagogy of abolitionism—i.e., one that, among other things, fights for social justice, challenges systematic oppression, battles supremacist assumptions, and accounts for the experiences of the marginalized: “Our schools and our teaching practices…need to be torn down and replaced with our freedom dreams rooted in participatory democracy and intersectional justice.”

A useful rejoinder, half a century on, to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; controversial but deserving of a broad audience among teachers and educational policymakers." www.kirkusreviews.com

her language here is really blunt and direct and i appreciate that. some parts seemed a little too didactic, and i definitely found some parts (especially the beginning) tough and slow to get through. but there is a lot of important information here, and just the idea of reconsidering how badly we botched school integration was reason enough for me to read this book.

i can't believe i never thought of or about alternatives to the way they integrated the schools that would have benefited equality and people of color immensely. this section of the book blew my mind: "Legal scholar Derrick Bell argued that Black folk would have been better served if the court had ruled differently in Brown v. Board of Education and enforced the 'equal' part of 'separate but equal.' W.E.B. Du Bois made a similar argument in 1935; he proclaimed, 'Negro children needed neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What they need is education.'"

"...racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, classism, mass incarceration, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are protected systems that will not be dismantled because we ask; they will be dismantled because we fight, demanding what they said was impossible, remembering through the words of Angela Y. Davis that 'freedom is a constant struggle.'"

"The fact that dark people are tasked with the work of dismantling these centuries-old oppressions is a continuation of racism."

"I ask my students every year to guess the percentage of Black people in the US population. ...Guesses range from 20 to 40 percent. In reality, Black folk make up just less than 14 percent of the US population. So, if you have limited interactions with Black folk, how can you think there are so many of us? Again, Black folk are highly visible and invisible at the same time. The sad truth is that White people can spend their entire lives ignoring, dismissing, and forgetting dark peoples' existence and still be successful in life. The latter is not the same for us."

"Whiteness is also a culture; it was created by the educational, social, economic, spiritual , and political conditions that intentionally and methodically give power to racism."

"'Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as White infants - a racist disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery, when most Black women were considered chattel.'" ( )

An Excellent, excellent book! ( )

Love begins by asserting that people of color want to matter. She decries the current educational system, which focuses on helping white kids learn and prosper, but on helping kids of color survive their school years (and often end up in the penal system). She calls for the institution of abolitionist teaching, which focuses instead on creating just, positive outcomes for all kids, and teaching them to dream of and work toward freedom.
The book is somewhat repetitive, but effective in hammering home Love's key message: tweaking the current system is not enough. She presents an interesting and well-thought-out alternative and makes a persuasive case for pursuing it. ( )

We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love is a provocative read challenging educators and those in charge of educational systems to do better by African American students and other students of color. Love uses both statistics and personal experiences from her time in the classroom to illustrate the disparities that African American students in the American public school system face. While persuasive, not everyone will be ready for Love's work. She pulls no punches when describing the problems in the educational system and the sources of those problems. This may not be the book for those who have no previous exposure to the systemic issues our country faces. But for those willing to have their eyes opened to something they may not have experienced themselves, this is an informative and challenging read. ( )

Love's book 'We Want to Do More Than Survive' makes a thought-provoking and compelling case fore rethinking the education system in the US. She provides insights from both data and her experience as a student, teacher, and teacher educator into how we are failing students of color. At times it feels a little repetitive, but the repetition serves to drive home the points she is making and, as a white reader, makes it possible to get a little more comfortable with the discomfort of benefiting from systems that privilege white people over dark people over and over again. She also makes concrete suggestions for how one can use white privilege to be a coconspirator and fight the racism that is endemic to our school systems.

Love has written a powerful indictment of our school system and how it harms Black children. The book mixes her personal experiences as a student and teacher with plenty of research to support her call for more supportive schooling that allows Black children to be themselves and become their best selves in an atmosphere of love and freedom. ( )

A very thought-provoking book written by a professor of educational theory that challenges the issues surrounding racial justice in education. As a white educator I found the book a challenge. I am grateful for the black and white writers who are helping us recognize racism as it continues to rear its ugly face in our institutions where the default is white. This book is a continuing challenge to all of us, teachers, parents, men and women in the street to adopt patterns that support FREEDOM for all. I also encourage everyone to read "White Fragility" by Robin Diangelo. ( )

A very candid and honest look at racism and how race affects education. This book is a must read for anyone in the education profession and all aspiring teachers. ( )

This was an eloquent explanation of why education in America must be completely restructured, and soon. The content of the book was great and illuminated the ways that oppressive educational systems continue to harm our children of color. The author is a reliable and confident source of this information. However, I think the book could be improved by having more clear boundaries on what content is in which chapter, which will help reduce repetition. At times it read more like an essay making a point that has been stretched way too long than a book with separate points adding to a whole thesis. I would also consider the audience- as someone well-versed in this "woke", socially-conscious academic world, this book was an easy read for me. However, I'm not sure that the book is supposed to stop at people like me, and if it should be reaching the masses and possibly educators who do not necessarily subscribe to this mindset, the language can be a bit exclusionary. No, it is not her job to educate people on racism and systemic oppression, but it the book is meant to be as informative as possible for actual change, the audience who actually needs to change could find this inaccessible. Otherwise, a profound book. ( )

Received as part of the Early Reviewers program. Definitely worth checking out. ( )

Summary: A plea and argument for abolitionist teaching that advocates for educational justice in our schools, that understands and is in solidarity with the struggle people of color face in our often racialized schools, and affirms the goodness and joy of one's ethnic, sexual, and gendered identity.

This book is an impassioned argument for "abolitionist teaching." The writer, educational theorist Bettina L. Love, offers this definition:

"Abolitionist teaching is the practice of working in solidarity with communities of color while drawing on the imagination, creativity, refusal, (re)membering, visionary thinking, healing, rebellious spirit, boldness, determination, and subversiveness of abolitionists to eradicate injustice inside and outside of schools" (p. 2).

In this work, she describes an "educational survival complex," in which schools serving people of color struggle under regimes of performance testing (and the testing companies who profit from all this), school report cards where "failing" jeopardizes funding, and often where students see few teachers of their own ethnicity. She describes how important the seemingly simple thing of mattering can be with examples of teachers, coaches, mentors, and advocates who said she mattered, helping her to obtain an athletic scholarship that launched her academic career.

She has harsh words to say about an educational culture that has only a cursory grasp of the power of white privilege, and does not understand the need for advocacy for children of color, or as she describes them, "we who are dark." She is highly critical of character education programs like Grit, arguing that the circumstances under which many students live already require grit in abundance. Instead, they may need celebrating. She also decries the substitution of character courses for those on civics--then engagement with the political structures needed to advocate for justice. She believes students need co-conspirators who educate with a culturally relevant pedagogy. She seems most concerned for teachers who call themselves "white" and who labor under the burden of whiteness and then afflict this on students of color.

Love also engages the additional layers of intersectionality as a black woman who is lesbian. She helps readers recognize the added layers of struggle to thrive involved in these additional layers and seeks to advocate for others in this situation.

I mention this book is an impassioned argument. Apart from citing some studies of the impact of having teachers of one's own ethnicity in one's schools, this book feels long on theory and short on practice. I do not have reservations about her arguments. It makes sense that students will do better when they know they matter and when their education speaks to their identity rather than tries to conform them to a dominant culture.

Rather, I would like to have seen a few case studies beside the author's own experiences where theory has been translated into practice, showing marked flourishing of students. Perhaps it is hard to implement such programs in the state and federally mandated testing regime approach to schools that I have heard teachers decry even in suburban schools with good report cards. It would be great to know of places where Love's approach is working.

Also, I recall a presentation by an educator on the faculty of a school dedicated to training teachers in justice pedagogy, but whose teachers were found to lack content competency in the subjects they taught, with the impact that school districts would no longer hire their teachers. It seems to me that a culturally relevant pedagogy that results in students flourishing, fosters excellence not only in artistic and social studies programs, but in reading, language, math and science programs. I hope subsequent works by this author addresses these matters.

Perhaps this is asking a great deal of one book. Perhaps first we need to hear the educational equivalent of "black lives matter" and sit with that truth. Love contends that "dark" students matter and what is needed are those who so enter into these students lives that they know existentially that they do matter. Too many are going through our schools without knowing that fundamental truth so crucial to grounding one's life. Anyone who has had a teacher who showed them they matter knows what this can mean. Hopefully every child will not be left to struggle to survive rather than be buoyed by such support and advocacy.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. ( )

This book offers an intense, and intensely personal, look at the structural injustices of the educational system in the United States. It situates educational injustice in the context of a much longer historical trajectory of racism and makes sure that readers understand the links between education "reform" and other aspects of the neoliberal political-economic system that inadequately address the inequities facing children of color, women and girls, and LGBTQ individuals. Bettina Love integrates her own story deftly into a book that brings together educational theory, critical race theory, and a tour of recent newsmaking examples of racism. The overall impact is at once blunt and uplifting, erudite and accessible. Anyone can read this book; I'd suggest that everyone should.

Bettina Love addresses what is needed for people of color in the United States to thrive rather than merely survive. She passionately argues for the need to create new systems and structures for educational, political, economic, and community freedom. While Love as an educator focuses the book primarily on the educational system, she also addresses the challenges that must be confronted in the wider American culture. She recognizes the intersectionality of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationalism, and dis/ability. Love advocates for abolitionist teaching, which is working in solidarity with communities of color to eradicate injustice in and outside of schools. Love defines what abolitionist teaching is and what it must accomplish, but this is not a how-to book providing a specific process for implementation. The strength of the book is to get readers to recognize that those on the margins of society are excluded because of systemic barriers. Educational reforms will be ineffective unless they address the root causes of injustice. Educators are not the only ones who should read this book. Every American concerned about the future of our nation can learn much from reading this volume. ( )