Please watch this six-minute presentation by Noliwe Rooks about her book Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education.
The video was produced by Bob Greenberg as part of his Brainwaves project.
Rooks is the Director of American Studies and Director of African-American Studies at Cornell University.
Her book is a fascinating history that examines the interest of billionaires in the education of communities of color.
Dr. Rooks will be a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Network for Public Education in Philadelphia in March 27-28, 2020.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for the heads up. I listened and watched. I will get the book. I doubt that I can make it to NPE next year, but this is a great choice for a keynoter.
C’mon Laura! You can do one more 🙂
It is much harder to target minority students when students attend an integrated school. Minority students benefit from attending a well resourced school. As we know, separate is never equal. With privatization in the mix this is truer than ever.
Cyber education is not just for home study anymore. These cyber vendors are convincing public superintendents and administrators to purchase this garbage and put it in their schools. Students and parents do not want it, but some administrators see it as a way to cut costs.
An essential thought: “It is much harder to target minority students when students attend an integrated school.”
Correction:
“These cyber vendors are convincing public supe-ADMINIMALS and THEIR ADMINIONS* to purchase this garbage and put it in their schools. Students and parents do not want it, but some ADMINIMALS see it as a way to cut costs.”
ADMINION (n.) Toady, sycophantic, ass-kissing lower forms of adminimals. A specialized boot-licking lackey who knows how to polish an adminimal’s apples easily identified by their distinctive brown nose.
I bought the book awhile ago on your recommendation, Diane. It fit well in the arc of my current reading which began with The Women’s Hour about the fight in Tennessee (the last state needed to ratify) over women getting the vote. The book hilighted the anti suffrage view being influenced by Reconstruction and the tension between universal suffrage and male suffrage, including men of color. So I next read Froner’s book on Reconstruction. Rook’s book continues the story of how we have never actually ever given poor folks or people of color a chance to achieve “the American Dream” through so many ways, especially education.
Now I need a book about the horrible Jim Crow era to complete the path. Any suggestions?
Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name is, in my opinion, THE essential text to understand evil of the Jim Crow. As I have written here before, if I could require Americans to read one book, this would be it. Another that I really got a lot out of, although it can get a bit academic at times is Leon Litwack’s Been in the Storm So Long. It’s also a good time to reread Huckleberry Finn if it’s been a while since you last read it.
I think I have commented recently that some local history in Biloxi, Mississippi re-oriented my understanding of Jim Crow. I now perceive it as a primarily small town turn of the century phenomenon, which makes sense in light of the 1896 Plessy V Ferguson case opening the door to,these laws. I used to think is was about retrenchment of salve owners control, but I now see it as more of a business and town thing.
Roy,
Jim Crow was a means of restoring slavery by another name and entrenching in law the subjugation of the black race. It was not a town vs. rural thing. It was a white thing.
I second “Slavery by Another Name.” Intense, powerful, and heartbreaking. I knew about the chain gangs, but I knew very little about the convict leasing system, and it absolutely opened my eyes and broke my heart.
Roy, I have long admired your insight and therefore it pains me greatly to read these sentences. Three observations: the roots of Jim Crow began at the end of the Civil War, more than 30 years before Plessy—which was a manifestation of Jim Crow, not a cause, and certainly changed its nature into the 20th century; slavery and its aftermath of the Reconstruction/Redemption/post-Plessy were not defined by urban-rural dichotomies; slave ownership was about using power to use human beings in business relationships, i.e., it was about economics using race as its essential currency. Anecdotal history in southern Mississippi is not a place to develop an understanding of this history. Consider more comprehensive resources. A simple starting point is Henry Louis Gates recent PBS series on Reconstruction. For more nuanced, complete histories, please refer to the books I mention above and other histories by Hugh Thomas, John Hope Franklin, James McPherson, Peter Kolchin, as well as a number of new, exciting histories that I have on my to-read list.
The story that is told in my county is of a meeting by a bunch of Shelbyville, TN women at the Dixie Hotel. To that point, the governor had not paid much attention to the issue of women voting. The story is that they heard he was staying at the hotel and went up there to talk to him, convincing him it would be in his best political interests to set serious about the amendment.
In a related story, I learned my mother was in the women’s voters club at her Baptist Women’s college, Meridith College, in Raleigh, NC in 1936.
I so enjoyed and got so much out of reading Cutting School right up to the final pages when she lets two young people speak to end her book. To me her choice of conclusion was like running into a brick wall the end of an exhilarating car journey. Anyone else out there who’s read this feel the same way?
Yes. I wondered the same thing.
I have felt that same about many modern-day books written about teacher/schools where I am on board until suddenly the writer loses me in the same way: the summation so depressingly often negates many of the book’s great epiphanies.
The video ran for about SIX minutes. If you don’t have SIX minutes to watch it, that is sad!
I think the video should be required viewing for everyone that lives in the U.S. from toddlers to centenarians. And for anyone like Donald Trump that clearly has Attention Deficit Disorder and a very leaky memory, along with many other disorders including both mental and sexual, they should be strapped to a chair every morning and be forced to watch it this video repeatedly for 365 days at least once every day.
That list should also include all the billionaires and millionaires supporting and/or funding cyber charter schools. That means Betsy DeVos, too.
I remember going to a segregated school in Charlotte NC in 1960. My father was ballistic about integration. The school I went to was all-white. We moved across town, and that school was all-white as well. We moved to Lexington KY in 1961, and I attended a public school, that was all-white. I never attended a school with any black children, until 1965.
When I lived in Shreveport LA, in 1974. the hospitals there , still had segregated blood banks for white and “colored”.