← The Preamble
The Preamble
Punished for Dreaming with Bettina Love
00:59:19
Sharon sits down with Dr. Bettina Love, Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University to discuss education reform, standardized testing, the devaluing of educators, and a list of ongoing systemic challenges in the U.S. school system.
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- [00:01]
Sharon McMahon
Today's episode is sponsored by NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast. Making financial decisions shouldn't feel like picking a new streaming show. Too many options, too easy to fall for the hype and you wish you'd done more research before committing. That's why I love NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast. Their finance journalists break down real world money decisions from investing to home buying to credit cards with clear research backed insights. The nerds help you cut through misinformation and get straight to the facts. So before you make your next financial move, get the clarity you need to make smart decisions with confidence. Follow NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast on your favorite podcast app. This episode of here's Where It Gets Interesting is brought to you by Alloy Women's Health Listen, Aging is not the most fun thing in the world, right? Most people think at least some aspects of it are kind of crappy. They have brain fog or problem sleeping or weight gain or hot flashes. And you know what? Menopause is inevitable, but it's also treatable. I just found out that almost half of women went three plus years before seeking relief from menopause or perimenopausal symptoms. Why would people do that? Maybe it's because 43% of women reported that their doctors never even mentioned menopause hormone therapy as an option for treatment. Another 40% didn't even know where to go if they needed help. Alloy can help you live your best, healthiest life, offering unlimited access to experts and safe science backed treatments for your symptoms. Your skin, your hair, your wellness, all delivered to your door. Everything is done online from the comfort of your home or anywhere. No waiting for an appointment or in line at the pharmacy. All you have to do is complete your intake. Their solutions are available by prescription, so you'll need to complete a short medical questionnaire and patient verification and then you design your treatment plan with a physician. You'll work with a menopause trained physician to finalize a personalized treatment plan tailored to your specific needs and then get your three month supply. Join the 95% of women who tried Alloy and saw relief in the first two weeks. Head to myalloi.com interesting and tell them all about your symptoms and you'll get a fully customized treatment plan and $20 off your first order. Head to my a l l o y.com interesting and enter code interesting to get $20 off your first order. Hello friends, welcome. Delighted to have you with me today. My guest is Dr. Bettina Love who is an educational historian. And our conversation about education in the United States could not be more timely or more important. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.
- [02:53]
Dr. Bettina Love
I am really excited to be joined today by Dr. Bettina Love. Thank you so much for your time. I'm very, very much looking forward to this conversation.
- [03:01]
Oh, thank you so much for having me. This is great. Thank you.
- [03:04]
Oh, it's truly my pleasure. I would love to hear more about your experience as an educator. Like, teachers always love to hear from other teachers. There's a lot of teachers listening to this, and there's a lot of parents who are listening to this. There's a lot of people who care about American history listening to this. So I really love that your work is really the intersection of all of these different topics. So tell us a little bit more about your background.
- [03:31]
So I was born and raised in upstate New York. I'm from Rochester, New York, and I grew up in a loving, thriving black community. You know, people probably don't know that Rochester, New York, during the 80s and 90s was the home of Xerox, Kodak, Bachalom, Paychex, Ragu champion sports Seagrams. It was just an amazing place, and I had amazing teachers. I had two amazing teachers that changed my life. One was Ms. Johnson. She was tall. She was from the South. She was no nonsense. And I loved her for it. And then my next black teacher was. My first black male teacher, was Mr. Clayton. He was tall, and he called us all by our last names. You know, he would love, get over here. Love do this, love do that. And he just was such an adoring, thoughtful, smart man. And I started playing basketball, and I would leave early, and my parents didn't know I was leaving early to play basketball. And so I would come to school dirty, and he would see me on the basketball court playing. And one day he said, love, do your parents know that you're out here playing early? I said, no. He said, I'm gonna tell your parents. I'm gonna keep watching you. I want you to keep playing, but don't come into my class dirty ever again. You bring a change of clothes, you iron those clothes, and you keep playing. I just had amazing teachers. High school, I had amazing teachers. So when I thought about what I wanted to do when I grew up in this world, I wanted to be one of those amazing teachers that I had who were loving and kind, and they were smart, and they dressed really well, and they even smelled good. I can remember how Good. They smelled. And I just wanted to be one of those teachers. And so I went to college on a basketball scholarship, and I had amazing professors who really poured into me to keep reading and writing and thinking critically. And so I became a teacher, and I started my teaching career in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I went to school. And then I moved to Miami and really got my teaching chops in homestead, Florida, about 45 minutes outside of Miami and US 1. And that's the first time I knew what diversity really meant. You know, when you go to Miami and there's students are speaking Creole and students are speaking Spanish, and there's all different dialects of Spanish, and everybody is just there. And I had so many amazing mentor teachers my first year teaching. And I just got a chance to see how beautiful it was to be a teacher and how difficult it is to be a teacher. And I wanted to research that. I wanted to understand that. And so that kind of drew me out of the classroom into a PhD program and start wanting to research teachers and study teachers. So I've always been somebody who just had a very profound respect for teachers and then becoming a teacher and now a parent. So I've just seen education from multiple lenses. And I've always seen dedicated, loving, smart people who want to inspire young people to be better citizens, to be better thinkers, to be critical thinkers, to see things from multiple perspectives, to change the world, want people to follow their dreams. So I've always been inspired by teachers since I was a little girl.
- [06:37]
I love that. And you have a really incredible new book out called Punished for Dreaming. How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal. And this is not just a book of like, well, here's all the problems. Best of luck. You. You have really taken the time to think about what it means to read this book, sit with the information, understand the repercussions of your research and your writing, and think about ways that you can help people not just heal, but also move forward. And that could be everyone from somebody who might want a coloring book to action plans, lesson plans, things that people can actually do to make changes, to implement ways that things might improve in the future. So I love that aspect of it, that it's not just like, here's a bunch of bad information and hope you're okay tonight. So it totally makes sense why, having been inspired by a number of fantastic teachers throughout your career, why you would want to become one. And then having gained experience in education, why you would want to study what makes education tick in the United States, what historic elements have conspired to create the system that we have now, both for the positive and the negative. But you really focus on this concept of school reform. And we were saying before we, we started that to many people, reform is a positive word. If you said, should we reform schools? Most people like, yeah, because there's some things that I don't agree with. Like, right, yeah, let's reform it. So let's first of all set the stage by talking about the type of reform that, that you have researched. And let's define the terms what reform means in the context of your book.
- [08:34]
Yeah, thank you for that. Because reform is this big word and which kind of encapsulates all these different changes that we should have in our society. And so everything falls under reform from crime reform, welfare reform, immigration reform, school reform. And so our country kind of uses the phrase reform as a catch all phrase to say they can fix almost anything with reform. And so we kind of as citizens just trust that our politicians are going to do the right thing because they use the word reform. And so we've used word reform throughout history as kind of a catch all to say we're going to fix these issues. Now the problem with reform is that typically the people who have destroyed this type of thing, this entity, are the ones who are going to so called reform it. And then they don't understand that you can't reform something that is not only broken, but working exactly the way you designed it to be broken. So you cannot simply reform that. And what we do with any type of reform, when it comes to welfare reform, immigration reform, education reform, crime reform, we pretty much deal with the edges of that type of system that is not only broken, but inherently unequal, inherently unjust, inherently underfunded, and inherently racist and anti black. So when you think about a system that has all of those issues facing it, you just can't tinker with the edges of it. You just can't try to say, hey, we're going to change this thing without focusing anywhere on the real issue. And so what reform does is it just tinkers with the edges. You get a little piece of reprieve, but you have not at all dealt with the structural issues that are continually to create disadvantages, discrimination and systems of poverty and structures for people in their real lives. And so reform is something that I would say does more harm than actual good because you're not at all dealing with the systematic structures that create the harm that within the system.
- [10:45]
Yeah, I mean, you could say we're going to reform how teachers are paid. But in reality, your reform could be, we're going to increase your cost of living adjustment by 1%. And that might be your definition of reform.
- [10:59]
Right.
- [10:59]
Does not address the structural issues of chronic school underfunding, the devaluing of educators, the idea that, you know, it's considered a helping profession. It's primarily women who are engaged in it. That we have all of these historically not paid women in an equitable way, that we've historically not paid teachers of color in an equitable way. Like there are 100 things.
- [11:21]
Right.
- [11:21]
That we could say that were not actually addressed by your reform reform.
- [11:28]
Yes.
- [11:29]
And so if I'm understanding you correctly, what you're saying is these reforms that people have engaged in over the last 40 years are making small adjustments to things that might seem obvious to the naked eye that a person looking at the system from the outside would be like, hey, we gave teachers a raise, thumbs up, that's a great reform, but it's not actually addressing the root causes of many of the issues that need to be addressed.
- [11:56]
Yes. And on top of that, many of the reforms become punitive. Many of the forms actually start to do more harm than good and compound the situation. For instance, we can talk about the reform of the testing movement and the high stakes standardized testing movement. That type of reform has not proven to show any results that we have in our education system that has proven to work. We can talk about reforms that have closed schools. That is a reform model that has been very hurtful in our school system right now. So some of these reforms, charter schools and vouchers and school choice, we say these things under the guise of reform.
- [12:36]
I don't know a single educator who is in favor of the high stakes testing models that we have been using in United States schools for decades now. I do not know a single one. And I have taught in three different states, currently know hundreds of teachers, and I do not know one single educator who thinks this benefits my students. This helps them learn better, this improves the quality of instruction. This is beneficial to education as a whole. That we engage in these high stakes testing. Not a single one.
- [13:12]
And also when you think about just the time, we now know that if you enter public education K and you go all the way through to 12th grade, you're going to take a total of 120. When he tests, minimum 120 tests throughout your K12 experience. The time, the money, the effort that is being put into is something that is so unproven. And that's another thing about reform, is that Many of these reform models are unproven. And we do it year after year, decade after decade, with unproven models again and again under the guise of school reform.
- [13:48]
That's absolutely right. The evidence that this improves anything is first of all not there. But secondly, to demonstrate that you are improving something, you need to actually quantify what it is that you aim to improve. What are you hoping to improve with this test? I have never heard that articulated. How are we improving a child's education by giving them millions of dollars worth of high stakes tests on a yearly basis? I don't think people realize how much money is spent on high stakes testing in the United States. It is staggering.
- [14:28]
It's a billion dollar industry and they spend millions lobbying to ensure that we keep these high stakes standardized testing. And so I don't think the average parent, the average taxpayer understands just how much money we have spent over the last 40, 50 years on standardized testing with absolutely no results. You would not do this in any other profession, in any other field that you would go down this road with no results, no data, and you just keep going.
- [14:57]
You're absolutely right. There's no other system, health care, private industry, nothing where we would dump billions of dollars into something to have it not improve anything and to have everyone who works within that system say this is harmful, let's stop doing this, and for outside forces to continue to force children to spend too large a percentage of their educational time engaged in these high stakes tests.
- [15:26]
The system is rigged. And parents, taxpayers don't understand the system is rigged because we have all of these so called data points and metrics that show these are good schools, these are bad schools. We just have all these ways in which to dispose of these schools. We have all these ways in which to talk badly and underperforming at risk. Like we have all of these phrases that we use that signal to parents that this is a bad school. You know, when I taught in Florida, Florida actually gives schools a letter grade in the newspaper. And so you can teach at an A school or you can teach at a D school if you're a parent, if you're a child, how does that make you feel walking in every day as a teacher, walking in every day, know you're teaching at a D school. And let me say this, when I taught at a D school in Homestead, Florida, those teachers taught, those parents showed up, those kids were there. And there were so many circumstances. We had students who had just got to the United States and now are being tested in English. That makes no sense. Why wouldn't you test these kids in their home language? Of course you're going to be at a D school when you're at a school where you're testing kids not in their home language and they're brilliant, but you can't test them in the language that they know. Like these are immeasurable circumstances that we're trying to tell politicians, we're trying to tell school board members, we're trying to tell parents this is not a winning solution for our greatest gift and that is our children in a democracy.
- [17:04]
You're absolutely right that we are applying a business mindset of we need to make our Q4 numbers and our projected revenue needs to be X. It's a this very data driven mindset of like we got to make the sales projection in order for everybody to get the whatever. And that has never been shown to do anything beneficial for an 8 year old.
- [17:29]
I talk about this in the book with educational entrepreneurs. Like what is an educational entrepreneur? How do you get to be an educational entrepreneur? That means you get to experiment, you get to fail, you get to have a scheme that you came out of business school with and then apply that to education. And where do you get to apply that? Low income, low performing schools filled with black and brown children who need the best. They don't need experiments, they don't need a 21 year old with a master's degree who's never taught in education. And now they got a scheme to try to come into schools and do this and do that and make millions of dollars off a program that they've never tried. Like this is where they get to experiment. And so it's not only that they're using a business model, they're also using our schools as a testing ground for unproven, untested curriculum models. All types of ways in which that they're all still making a great deal of money from. We have venture capitalists in education now. We have everybody who wants to make money. They see this as the wild wild west. They see this as open season for money making through through educational entrepreneurship. What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? That means you have to fail and who are you going to fail with? Black and brown children.
- [18:51]
They don't test these programs in the top performing schools in the country or.
- [18:55]
Where their children are.
- [18:57]
That's right. There's no experimentation with like hey, we got this dude who just graduated, he's got an idea. Let's drop a nice chunk of change on this new curriculum that's going to turn around this at risk school? No, no, they do not experiment in the top performing schools in the country. They are going with what works, which is things like small class sizes, individualized instruction for children who are coming from other places or who are in need, special education services, highly trained teachers, highly qualified teachers in small classrooms. Those are the things that are demonstrated with data to improve educational outcomes. Not a dude who wants to get rich quick, right?
- [19:43]
And has a great PowerPoint, has a great deck.
- [19:46]
Yeah, oh yeah.
- [19:47]
If you have a great deck in education, you can set yourself up making eighty, a hundred thousand dollars a year. You got a great program, you sell this and here we go. We experiment on black and brown children and that is also one of the reasons reform has done so much harm. Because under reform these individuals are able to experiment. Unproven ideas come into education, make their money, make their millions, leave, and black and brown children are left in educational debt. As Gloria Ladson Billings would say.
- [20:20]
Running.
- [20:21]
Sharon McMahon
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- [21:37]
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- [23:49]
Dr. Bettina Love
I want to talk a little bit about the concept of school choice and school vouchers because this is so such a hot topic in education right now. And I see so many people saying things like if you really cared about black and brown children's educational experiences, you would allow them to leave their failing schools and go to a better school. I'm sure you're quite familiar with exactly what I'm saying, that if you really cared about black and brown kids, you'd remove them from their inner city failing school. So interesting how you equate inner city with failure. It's never let the kids leave the failing suburban school. That's an oxymoron. Failing suburban school, that's an oxymoron doesn't exist. But this idea that because the schools in the inner city are so irreparably broken, the best way to care for the educational needs of the children attending them is to let them leave that school and to let them go to a different, better school. And I would love to hear your take on that.
- [25:07]
I just want to give a little history lesson because what I want to be very clear about is that if you talk to somebody who is, let's say, 70 years old, 80 years old, and they grew up in America's public schools, they have no clue what we're talking about. The very ideas of school choice and vouchers and lotteries and all magnet schools and charter schools. They have no clue what we are talking about. How did this happen? How did we get here? We integrated schools in this country. Brown versus the Board of Education, 1954. There was massive resistance to Brown. The resistance was so massive that we now saw private schools pop up, what we call segregation academies. We saw the United States government give these segregation academies tax breaks. And so you started to see the notion of school choice pop up. Once we integrated schools in this country and we saw white flight, we saw white folks leave the inner cities, create the suburbs, and now you have schools in the inner city who have been gutted of resources, gutted of teachers. We saw property values. All of these things happened after we tried to integrate schools in this country. And then you had notions of school choice.
- [26:31]
When I tell people that if you went to a private religious school in the south that is in like a nice suburb, chances are extraordinarily high that you went to a segregation.
- [26:44]
Segregation. That's.
- [26:45]
That is correct and extraordinarily high. Unless you can say, like, this school was started by nuns in the 1850s. Unless you can say that, chances are good that your school started in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, it's religiously affiliated and exists in a relatively nice suburban area. Segregation academy. Because in some places, like Virginia, Arkansas, other locations, they just decided, we're not integrating.
- [27:18]
They decided to close schools for everybody.
- [27:21]
We're just closing.
- [27:22]
We will close schools for everybody before we integrate schools. And so we saw a gutting of public education. We should have the resources, we have the know how to say each school in this country should be a world class school. You should not have to leave your neighborhood to say, here's a better school, because every child cannot do that. Every child cannot afford the voucher and make up the difference. You shouldn't have to be shipped around and bused around to try to find a good school in your community. Because if we remember that is what Brown was about, Brown was Linda Brown, a little black girl who had to leave her neighborhood school to try to find a better school. So if we're still saying school choice, then what we're saying is that we have not done anything since Brown versus the board of education because our children should not be leaving their neighborhood to still try to Find a better school to get a voucher, to get a lottery to get into a charter school. We should be saying as a country that each school is valuable and each school we should put resources in and teachers in, and each school we should ensure that that there is clean water and clean air. We have schools right now in the inner city that don't have clean water and don't have clean air. There is no choices. This is not a choice. In a democracy, you don't have some schools that you say are better and some schools that you know are bad. And now we're going to try and ship all of these students to that school. That's not how this should work. And we know that's not how it should work. And so when I hear the word school choice, what I'm hearing is you don't want to fix all of America's schools. You don't want to deal with the real issues, and you just want to have a band aid. And when you say better, what do you mean by better? Because oftentimes when you say better, what you mean is white.
- [29:08]
You're so right that we have, for the latter half of the 20th century into the 21st century, we have systematically starved America's public schools of the resources they need. And if we did that to any other thing, farmland, for example, if we never took care of our farmland, and then we're like, this farmland doesn't produce, you know, like, there would be no shock. And like, oh, if you never give it any water ever, and you dump toxic chemicals on it, oh, it doesn't grow things. Shocking. So it actually should not even come as a surprise that we are now reaping the fruits of what we have sown. And the solution is not to continue not watering and dumping toxic chemicals on the farmland. The solution is to make the farmland productive again so that everyone has the chance to a high quality education that meets their needs.
- [30:10]
Yes, it's not hard. We know what to do.
- [30:13]
That's right.
- [30:13]
We know students need a rich curriculum. We know students need teachers who are highly skilled, highly trained teachers. We know students need classrooms that are state of the art classrooms that have all the technology that they need. We know students need extracurricular programs. We know how much art and dance and sports play into the full experience of students. We know they need smaller classrooms. We know what works. The fact that we will keep going down a path that we know has done harm for the last 40 years through reform, and we know what works is unbelievable to me. And I love that you said we have really truly starved education in a targeted way because everybody isn't starving. And we know exactly where those schools are. We know exactly what needs to be done. Each student in this country is around 12,000, $13,000 per pupil. Our most neediest students, they need to be around $42,000 per pupil. So we are underfunding our students each and every day, particularly the ones who need the most in this country. It is unbelievable. And we talk about data all the time, but when you start to give this type of data. Oh, nobody wants to hear that.
- [31:27]
Nope, that is not. I don't like the words coming out of your mouth, so.
- [31:33]
Right, right. But we want to test. We're going to test what? Well, let's look at this testing data. Students are not performing well. These are the reasons they're not performing. They don't have highly trained and highly skilled and highly credentialed teachers. They don't have small classrooms. We have to understand that this is not sustainable for a democracy. This is not sustainable for our children. And this is a country that can't keep going in this direction with one of the hallmarks of democracy, which is public education.
- [32:01]
I love that you said we know what works. This is not a mystery. It's actually quite straightforward. We know exactly what works. And yet instead of doing what we know works, we continue to dump billions of dollars into experiments instead of doing what actually works. This is a topic that gives me riled up, but you know, I don't like it. This is another one of the challenges that we are currently facing, which is teacher retention. Teachers do not want to teach in today's educational environment. Farmers don't want to farm land that has no water and is full of toxic chemicals. Turns out, turns out farmers are like, you know what, that's not productive. I can't work with that. We have been staring down a teacher shortage crisis for a long time in terms of not training nearly the number of educators that we need to replace retirements. That has been like a train that is coming towards us, picking up speed for a long time now. If you take that and you add in the pandemic and you add in the political system that has caused education to become a culture war topic where every other teacher is a groomer because they're trying to read a book about black childs to their school children and you add in the starvation of resources where teachers are spending 7, 8, $900 thousand dollars of their own own money salary every year to just get kids what they need. It has created such a perfect storm of issues where we had unprecedented numbers of teachers quitting in the middle of the year. And anybody who is a teacher knows like, oh, heck, no, you don't quit in the middle of the year. You absolutely do not quit in the middle of the year. In fact, teachers try to time when they're going to give birth so that they're gone for as little a time as possible.
- [34:22]
You know, like teachers try surgeries, births, weddings. Their whole lives are around staying for the full year.
- [34:29]
Yes, that's right. That's right. Teachers do not want to leave in the middle of the year. Like, it produces so much anxiety and guilt. So to quit in the middle of the year says so much. Hundreds of thousands of teachers quit in the 2122 school year in the middle of the year. This is a tragedy. It is a crisis. And I have not even scratched the surface of all of the issues surrounding teacher retention. And also just encouraging teachers to go into education to begin with. What do you make of this? What are we doing to ourselves and how can we fix it?
- [35:09]
This is by design. You have very powerful forces who want to privatize education. You have very powerful forces who believe that education should not be free in this country. You have a group of people in this country who are very powerful, and they want to make sure that the billions of dollars that we spend on education as public dollars become private dollars. And the way that you do that is you create chaos. You create crisis after crisis after crisis. And we're watching them create crises in education. And so all of these things that teachers are facing right now, particularly the book bans, the critical race theory bans, you can't say anything about queer kids and trans kids in schools. And we've seen no proof that this is even happening. And let's be very clear, that's not a bad thing. We got to stand up and say, you teaching black history is not a bad thing. You're not going to make me think that if I teach black history, I'm a bad person. You're going to make me think that if I teach that queer students exist and queer people are beautiful. You're not going to convince me and shame me for doing that. And so we now have a teacher shortage because over the last 45 years, we have not put in the recruitment efforts, and we have watched student loan debt skyrocket. Why would I want to take out $90,000 in debt to make $45,000 a year? And one in five teachers moonlights? So if I Am somebody looking at a profession? Why would I want to go into a profession where I could be railroaded? I could become a political pawn, I could find myself in a national spotlight for trying to teach black history. I'm going to get into extreme amount of debt, and I'm going to make $45,000 a year, and I'm going to have to moonlight and find another job just to supplement my income with the rising cost of everything right now. How do you sell this profession? Then? I also have to think about. I go to a charter school. I may not have tenure. I will not sit here and try and sugarcoat this profession. But what I try to say is that, listen, it is a sacrifice, yes, but it is a beautiful sacrifice. And I truly believe right now that teachers, and this is not hyperbole, I truly believe that teachers are going to hold up this democracy. Because if we're going to teach the next generation of young people how to disagree but not be disagreeable, how to disagree but not go and resort towards violence, if we're going to teach the next group of people how to be critical thinkers and see history from multiple perspectives and see history from multiple angles, and try to understand what you believe and what you understand that is actually critical thinking. Just having one book is not critical thinking. Having a variety of understanding, a variety of images, a variety of art and dance and expression. We need teachers right now because our world needs humanity. Our world needs love and compassion. Our world needs young people who understand that, you may not agree with me, but you don't have to be violent. And teachers are going to be the ones in the classroom with our students every day who can teach them that. On top of critical thinking skills, on top of math and English and science, and we do all of that. But right now, as a country, a country that is facing so much violence, we're going to need teachers to really step in and teach young people how to be loving and kind and human to each other. And I see teachers doing the unbelievable work of holding up our democracy right now.
- [39:08]
It's so good. I love that. You know, I have a daughter who absolutely loves school. She has the best teachers. She loves her teachers. Over the summer, she's like, oh, my gosh, I can't wait to go back and see Mr. So and so. I just love him. She just loves everything about school. And she's so smart and so enthusiastic. I recently said, have you ever thought about becoming a teacher? You obviously love school, and you obviously love teachers. You are a teenager who loves teachers. So These could be your actual peers. You could be doing for kids what they're doing for you. Think about what an impact your teachers are having on your life. And she thought about it for a minute and you could tell that the idea is appealing to her. And then she said, yeah, but I don't want to spend my career being disrespected and poor. And that is entirely the point. I don't want to spend my career being disrespected and poor. Yeah, it's no wonder that our best and brightest, a child who absolutely would make a phenomenal teacher. Like, her level of energy and enthusiasm is through the room. She would be a phenomenal teacher. Like I know what it takes. But she's not even willing to entertain the idea for long because she doesn't want to be disrespected in poor and go to college for five, six years racking up all this debt to only to be disrespected and poor.
- [40:37]
Sharon McMahon
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- [45:06]
Dr. Bettina Love
Sharon, she's making a sophisticated decision. She's making a very thoughtful decision. I mean, this country is disrespectful to teachers. What we saw in the pandemic, the disrespect, oh my God. And every Time you get your paycheck, that's a sign of what you value.
- [45:26]
That's right. Every time I get paid, I feel more disrespected.
- [45:30]
More disrespected. So she's making a very sophisticated, thoughtful decision that if I don't want this to be my life, and I think, you know, my wife's a teacher, you know, just like you. I have many friends who are teachers, and the first thing they'll say is that the parents know. The parents are saying to them, I wish you got paid more. What can I do? How can I help out? The parents are like, I see this person doing these amazing things for my kid and I'm hearing everything that's being said about them. And it's not mathing, it's not adding up. I don't understand it. But at the end of the day, how do you want your child to go into this? I mean, as a black person, I'm a first generation college student. My parents didn't go to college. And so when you say to a first generation college student, hey, I want you to come out as the first person to ever go to college in your family and go into a profession where you're going to be disrespected and you're not going to make any money, but, hey, go to college for the first time. Like, how do you sell this? But I do believe there are so many forces in this country who want to see education privatized and done with. And they are happy that we are facing this crisis. They are enthusiastic that education is going into this direction because they want to privatize it. And so they will keep creating crises after crisis. That is manufactured. And many of the things that we're watching right now in education, they're manufactured crisis. They don't actually exist. We're seeing right now. The Washington posted a wonderful analysis of these book bans, particularly focused on LGBTQ book bans and what they found out that 10 people were responsible for almost 60% of the book bans. 10 people. There are forces at hand right now that are ensuring that there is a crisis in education, that is making education look like something that is out of control. And back to the where we started. When you can make something look like it is out of control, that the government cannot do anything with it, then you can come in and say, we have to reform this structure. And that is how you do it. Create a crisis, create distraction, make sure everybody believes that it's dysfunctional, and then you have to reform it. And how do you reform it through the private sector? This is not by happenstance. This is happening right now. And it is a full out plan that we are seeing being executed in education right now with surgical precision.
- [48:13]
Okay, I want to ask you about one more thing. I mean, this episode could be six hours long. We would not run out of things to talk about, trust me. But one of the things that I think is often really overlooked when it comes to US History, black history, educational history is. I mean, of course, for most of American history, black folks were denied education. Schools or states just refused to spend money on it. It was illegal to teach enslaved people how to read because education is liberation. Right. Makes you dangerous if you know too much. So we're going to make sure you don't know anything. And then when schools finally did start popping up post Civil War, especially throughout the south, they were funded largely by the black communities.
- [49:07]
Come on, teach. Let's go teach. Yes, teach.
- [49:10]
Yes. Black communities who paid twice for the schools, paid two times with their taxes, and then they also gave more money of their own, personal money to fund these schools recently.
- [49:24]
Now what you're saying is that these individuals were recently enslaved. Now they were not enslaved anymore, and they are now doing that type of work just up from slavery. Yes. It's unbelievable to think about paying twice.
- [49:39]
Thousands, thousands of schools popped up around the south in a very short period of time. Largely funded not by state money.
- [49:49]
Yes.
- [49:50]
Largely funded not by local property taxes. Yes. There were some, like northern philanthropists involved, but the majority of the money came directly from the black community. Black teachers worked in the schools. Black teachers became integrated into the communities and really got to understand exactly what this community needed. And they ended up filling a lot of gaps that nobody else was willing or able to fill. These children need dentists. Let's get a dentist out here. Let's organize a dental clinic. Mrs. So and so over there is really behind canning her tomatoes. I am going to go there on Saturday and help them because that is what this community needs.
- [50:34]
That's right.
- [50:35]
And in many cases, these teachers, of course, were absolutely overworking themselves, were working seven days a week. When you look at the logs of teachers from this time period, they literally worked seven days a week.
- [50:46]
That's right.
- [50:46]
They were going to three and four church services a Sunday to spend time meeting members of the community to make the case for I care about your children. Your children need an education. Please send your children to this school, you know, if we're going to do right by them. And so you see an absolutely monumental Amount of problems, progress in the black community when black teachers were allowed to educate their community members.
- [51:14]
That's right.
- [51:15]
And then wanting equality, understandably, when brown versus the board of education happens, we then saw a complete collapse of black teacher influence in the black community. A complete collapse. Because when schools were integrated. And again, this is not saying we should have segregated schools, but the way that the system then became set up, it's not like the state of Alabama was like, you know what? Good call, good call. We like it, we're doing it. That's not what happened. Right. Like you mentioned the enormous resistance in the south to integrating schools. Some schools were closed for five years.
- [51:59]
Right.
- [51:59]
Enormous resistance. It wasn't like the schools integrated at the black school, Bettina. It wasn't like the people said, hey, send your white kids out to this phenomenal teacher out of the Oak Road school out in the country with the other black children. No, no, no. It was the black children who then began to attend the white schools. And what happened to the. The thousands and thousands of black educators who had dedicated their entire lives and pursued high levels of education and done a phenomenal job with their students. There were not positions made for those teachers, by and large, in the white schools. And we are now reaping the fruit.
- [52:50]
That's right.
- [52:50]
Of what we have sown when we systematically drove thousands and thousands of black teachers out of America's schools.
- [52:59]
You just gave a lesson. You just gave a lesson. And it is absolutely one that more people need to understand and hear because they don't know the history of black education, don't know the history of the beauty of black education and black educators. And if I could add just a few things.
- [53:17]
Please do. I would love that.
- [53:19]
First of all, these educators were highly skilled master's PhDs. They were educated at some of the top schools in the country. Teachers College, where I am now. They couldn't go to many of these schools in the South. Many of these schools in the south actually sent them to the north to get educated because they refused to enroll them. So they went to some of the best schools in the country, got their teaching credentials, got their degrees and then came back to the south to teach. Many HBCUs had education departments and teachers. What you are saying, just to add some numbers to it, after Brown versus the Board of Education, we lost upwards to 38,000 black educators. We lost 90% of black principals. And it's really easy to understand if I would not let my child sit next to a black child, I'm certainly not going to Let you teach them and the community that we lost, the curriculum that we lost and what we know. There's a great book called the Jim Crow Pink Slip. And in that book she talks about how during the 30s and 40s and 50s, black teachers in the south made upwards to 30 to 50% of educators. 30 to 50% of educators were made up in the south of black teachers. Now here we are, fast forward 2023, where Black men make up less than 2% of Black teachers. Black women make up less than 8% Black people. Black teachers in general have not hit over 10% in the last 40 years. But another statistic that is so important is that if you are a low income black student and you have one black teacher in grades three through five, the likelihood that you will graduate and go to college increases by almost 39%. One black teacher. So if we hire black teachers again, because what you're hitting at is that black teachers do the invisible labor. It's invisible labor that black teachers do. Black teachers, yes, are going to the football games. They're going to the community. They live in the community. They're going to talk to the mamas and daddies and grandmas. They're doing that invisible labor that we know is critical not only to education, but community. And that's what we want. We want community. We want these kids to feel like my school is part of my community, my teachers are part of my community, that everyone cares for me. And that is what we had before we integrated schools in this country. We had highly skilled, highly qualified educators when everybody respected them, saw them as leaders and pillars of the community and invested in that. You know, there's this great quote in Du Bois, reconstruction. And what he says is that there is no public education in the south without the Negro. The very idea of public education in the south is black America's idea. And to understand that black folks newly freed, the first thing that they would do was build school, they understood how profoundly important it was that their children was educated. Because as you said, education is liberation. And so we have watched the gutting of not only public education in this country, but we've watched the gutting of black education in this country because it wasn't always like this.
- [57:01]
That's right. It absolutely impacts children of color to see and have teachers that are from their community. It absolutely does. But it also positively impacts white children to have teachers of color.
- [57:18]
Yes, there is nothing like seeing yourself and then there's nothing like seeing an example of something you didn't even know exists. But now you know is great. There's nothing like it. And I don't think like you're saying we put enough value into what we really mean by diversity. And let's be very clear. I think we have to understand why, particularly in our society, in the context that students are living in, why having a diversity of teachers are important. Because we live in a hyper segregated society. So if I'm a little white kid, I probably only see black people at school, my community and the friends of my parents and where we shop and where we spend our time, where we go to church, activities that we do, the shows that we watch, the books that are in our house, all of these things are probably showing me a world that is just white. And so the only place in my little world as a five year old or as an eight year old, the only place in my world where I'm going to get some actual diversity is going to be that school. And that is why schools being the engineers of diversity and schools being places where we have multiple religions and genders and we see different races and ethnicities and different income levels. That's why it's so important. Important because as a society we have really segregated ourselves and our schools have to be the places that show students what the actual world looks like. And that everybody in this world is valuable. Everybody in this world is making contributions. Everybody in this world is coming with different identities that makes them beautiful. And that you are coming as a white child with different identities and different histories and you are beautiful too. And we're all going to come into this place and we're going to do the hard work of learning about each other through difficult conversations around history. We're going to learn about science, we're going to learn about math, we're going to do social studies, we're going to do all these subjects and we're also going to learn about each other. And that's what the beauty of public education is.
- [59:41]
And that is the underpinning of democracy. Bettina, the end of this episode, we, we really could talk for. I mean truly. How much time do you have? We could talk for five or six hours. I'm just gonna have to have you back. I know people are gonna love this episode and people will care passionately about this topic and they're absolutely gonna love hearing your perspectives on this topic. But tell everybody where they can find you online. People should absolutely go buy punished for dreaming. But where could people go to get more information about some of the resources that you have and information you have?
- [60:17]
Yes, thank you. For that question, please go to Bettinalove.com there you can buy the book. We have a coloring book that we're giving out with the book. We have a study guide that will walk you through the big ideas in the book. It'll walk you through all the wonderful stories that are in the book. So we have a study guide. We have a coloring book that's on black joy and creativity and dreaming for Black children. We also have an album that we have produced with amazing artists around Songs of Joy and Liberation. So the book is an experience. So please go to Bettinalove.com, go to the Toolkit page and you'll see all the ways in which you can not only just read about the book and buy the book, but also have an experience around learning around the big topics and the big issues that are in the book. I'm on Twitter at Belovesol Power. I'm on Instagram at Beloved Soul Power. And before we go, I just want to say thank you. This was an amazing time that I had with you. This was an amazing space that you have created and I'm just really grateful to be on your show and to your audience. You are doing some work, you are teaching and so thank you for the work that you're doing and educating us, particularly in this moment, in this time right now where there's so much misinformation and disinformation and information to get to the point, to get to the issues and to say it in a way that really speaks to everybody. I'm just really grateful. So thank you.
- [61:44]
Thank you. I absolutely love this. This is even better than I anticipated and I would love to have you back anytime.
- [61:52]
Sharon McMahon
Patina.
- [61:52]
Dr. Bettina Love
When I see your email, I'm ready.
- [61:55]
Sharon McMahon
You can find Dr. Patina Love's book Punished for Dreaming wherever you buy your books.
- [62:01]
Dr. Bettina Love
And if you want to support independent.
- [62:03]
Sharon McMahon
Bookstores, you can go to bookshop.org thanks for being here. Thank you so much for listening to here's where it gets interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show that helps podcasters out so much? I'm your host and executive producer Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. We'll see you soon.
- [62:32]
Dr. Bettina Love
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- [62:39]
Better than proving people wrong is out driving them.
- [62:42]
I'm 14 year old golfer Tommy Morrissey.
- [62:45]
And I want to be remembered for.
- [62:46]
My ability as a champion partner of the Masters. Bank of America supports everyone. Determined to find out what's possible in golf and in life. What would you like the power to do? Bank of America. Bank of America. NA member FDIC. Copyright 2025. Bank of America Corporation. All rights reserved.