Bøger af Noliwe Rooks

"Any serious effort to understand how the Black civil rights generation found role models, vision, and inspiration during their midcentury struggle for political power must place Bethune at its heart. Her success was unlikely: the 15th of 17 children and the first born into freedom, Bethune survived brutal poverty and caste subordination to become the first in her family to learn to read and to attend college. She gave that same gift to others when in 1904, at age 29, Bethune welcomed her first class of five girls to the Daytona, Florida, school she herself had founded. In short order, the school enrolled hundreds of children and eventually would become the university that bears her name to this day. Bethune saw education as an essential dimension of the larger struggle for freedom, vitally connected to the vote and to economic self-sufficiency. ... [The author] grew up in Florida, in Bethune's shadow: her grandparents trained to be teachers at Bethune-Cookman University, and her family vacationed at the all-Black beach that Bethune helped found in one of her many entrepreneurial projects for the community. The story of how--in a state with some of the highest lynching rates in the country--Bethune carved out so much space, and how she catapulted from there onto the national stage, is, in Rooks' hands, a moving ... example of the power of a will and a vision that had few equals"--

2018 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction) FinalistA timely indictment of the corporate takeover of education and the privatizationand profitabilityof separate and unequal schools, published at a critical time in the dismantling of public education in AmericaPublic schools are among America's greatest achievements in modern history, yet from the earliest days of tax-supported educationtoday a sector with an estimated budget of over half a billion dollarsthere have been intractable tensions tied to race and poverty. Now, in an era characterized by levels of school segregation the country has not seen since the mid-twentieth century, cultural critic and American studies professor Noliwe Rooks provides a trenchant analysis of our separate and unequal schools and argues that profiting from our nation's failure to provide a high-quality education to all children has become a very big business. Cutting School deftly traces the financing of segregated education in America, from reconstruction through Brown v. Board of Education up to the current controversies around school choice, teacher quality, the school-to-prison pipeline, and more, to elucidate the course we are on today: the wholesale privatization of our schools. Rooks's incisive critique breaks down the fraught landscape of ';segrenomics,' showing how experimental solutions to the so-called achievement gapsincluding charters, vouchers, and cyber schoolsrely on, profit from, and ultimately exacerbate disturbingly high levels of racial and economic segregation under the guise of providing equal opportunity. Rooks chronicles the making and unmaking of public education and the disastrous impact of funneling public dollars to private for-profit and nonprofit operations. As the infrastructure crumbles, a number of major U.S. cities are poised to permanently dismantle their public school systemsthe very foundation of our multicultural democracy. Yet Rooks finds hope and promise in the inspired individuals and powerful movements fighting to save urban schools. A comprehensive, compelling account of what's truly at stake in the relentless push to deregulate and privatize, Cutting School is a cri de coeur for all of us to resist educational apartheid in America.