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 joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. 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. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.