Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education

by Noliwe Rooks, Diane Ravitch (Foreword by)

Overview

2018 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction) Finalist

A timely indictment of the corporate takeover of education and the privatization—and profitability—of separate and unequal schools, published at a critical time in the dismantling of public education in America

"An astounding look at America's segregated school system, weaving together historical dynamics of race, class, and growing inequality into one concise and commanding story. Cutting School puts our schools at the center of the fight for a new commons."
—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything

Public schools are among America's greatest achievements in modern history, yet from the earliest days of tax-supported education—today a sector with an estimated budget of over half a billion dollars—there 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 gaps—including charters, vouchers, and cyber schools—rely 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 systems—the 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620975985
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	03/03/2020
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	694,772
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Noliwe Rooks is the director of American studies at Cornell Universityand was for ten years the associate director of African American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of White Money/Black Power and Hair Raising. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Table of Contents

Foreword Diane Ravitch ix

Preface xiii

Introduction: The Segrenomics of American Education 1

1 Rich College Students, Poor Public Schools 23

2 White Philanthropy, Black Education 49

3 Brown Children, White Retribution 79

4 How the North Wasn't One 109

5 Education Dreams and Virtual Nightmares 139

6 Stealing School 161

7 The Age of Resistance 185

Coda: Trickle-Up Education 209

Acknowledgments 237

Notes 239

Index 255

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/07/2017
Illustrating the ways that segregation, poverty, and race intertwine to affect America’s education landscape, Rooks (White Money/Black Power) clearly and vigorously maps the systemic disadvantages imposed upon students of color and the poor. “The infrastructure, ideology, progress, and promises all fall more than a little short if the goal is equality,” Rooks argues. While the performance gap between students from poor schools and wealthy schools is widely reported, Rooks shows how reform efforts have “focused far less on the structure or system itself and more on the failures of those it is designed to educate.” By closely examining these federally supported and increasingly privatized initiatives over the past 30 years, Rooks finds both a growing racial divide in education and an increasingly lucrative sector of business. She introduces the term segrenomics, which she defines as “the business of profiting from high levels of racial and economic segregation.” Pointing to the financial success of organizations such as Teach for America (valued at $400 million dollars in 2016), Rooks questions who actually benefits from charter schools, voucher programs, and virtual schooling. She argues that reform must integrate those who are most often excluded from the process: teachers and members of disenfranchised communities themselves. Poignant and plainly stated, Rooks’s thorough narrative of socioeconomics urges greater criticism and thoughtfulness about education reform in the 21st century. Agency: Diana Finch Literary Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Cutting School:
"Poignant and plainly stated, Rooks's thorough narrative of socioeconomics urges greater criticism and thoughtfulness about education reform in the 21st century."
—Publisher Weekly (starred)

"A convincing argument that the only viable, proven school reform strategy is integration, a solution distressingly difficult to achieve."
—Kirkus Reviews

"I threw the book across the room and paced the floor. This is an important work; hopefully it will make people mad enough to act."
—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

"A bold and groundbreaking work. . . . This timely book is essential reading not only for anyone who cares about the well-being of our children, but for all who care about the future of democracy and justice in America."
—Danny Glover, actor and humanitarian

"Crisply written and meticulously researched, Cutting School is not only a compelling historical analysis but also a daring exposé of how the corporatization of public schools reproduces unequal, unjust educational opportunity. I cannot wait to share this book with my students and colleagues."
—Prudence Carter, author of Closing the Opportunity Gap and dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education

"A devastating and timely critique of the moral bankruptcy and racial double standards of the educational reform movement. Cutting School should transform the scholarly and activist conversation about privatization and public education just as Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow has done for the war on drugs and mass incarceration."
—Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness

Cutting School is the book that I have been waiting for. Rooks introduces the term 'segrenomics' into our political lexicon and has provided the vibrant movement against corporate education reform a powerful tool imbued with political clarity, historical rigor and contemporary relevance. Read this book!"
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

"A work that brilliantly connects history to the present. . . . A must-read for anyone interested in saving public education."
—Angel Harris, author of Kids Don't Want to Fail

"With this smart book and wise intervention Rooks will change the way you understand the challenges and possibilities ahead."
—Bill Ayers, author of Demand the Impossible! and To Teach

"Rooks shrewdly documents the nation's centuries-long failure to 'safely' educate black and brown children, from John D. Rockefeller's and the General Education Board's twentieth-century efforts to the twenty-first-century correlates promoted by the Wendy Kopps and the Mark Zuckerbergs. Thomas Jefferson's 'wolf of slavery' haunts its pages. Don't miss it."
—Bob Moses, founder of the Algebra Project

Praise for Noliwe Rooks's Hair Raising, a Choice Outstanding Book Award winner:
"[S]o compelling."
—Booklist

"[A] welcome entry in the feminist debates about American 'beauty culture'…Readable, accessible, and helpfully illustrated."
—Choice

Praise for Noliwe Rooks's White Money, Black Power:
"[T]his volume is a must for anyone working in the field."
—Publishers Weekly

"Rooks is a serious scholar and insider of African American studies, and this book is full of deep insight and sharp analysis."
—Cornel West

"A provocative and original history."
—Farah Jasmine Griffin

From the Publisher

2017-06-27
An exploration of how minority and poor children continue to be the victims of pernicious educational reforms.Weighing in on the charged topic of public education, Rooks (American Studies/Cornell Univ.; White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education, 2006, etc.) mounts a blistering and persuasive argument against school reforms that she sees as detrimental to disadvantaged students. Charter schools and their management organizations, vouchers, virtual schools, and "an alternatively certified, non-unionized teaching force" are basically capitalist ventures that enforce segregation. She calls the reform efforts "segrenomics": business strategies that prey on powerless communities and do not account for the necessary voices of parents, teachers, or students. Rooks is equally critical of the past four presidents, whose proposals, despite their optimistic titles, failed to alleviate dysfunction. She traces the movement for privatization to the 1990s, when the Edison Project, an independent for-profit chain of schools, persuaded state and city governments that its schools could "break the mold of traditional education and outperform public schools." Reaping tax dollars and corporate investment, the Edison Project never achieved "the promised profits or test score gains." Yet despite its failure, it spawned a growing charter school industry, most recently touted by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Rooks opposes vouchers, an idea promoted by economist Milton Friedman, "who wanted to dismantle public education." Indeed, in communities that instituted vouchers, white families often used them to keep their children in predominantly white schools, and black schools deteriorated. The quest to educate disadvantaged students as cheaply as possible has led to an increased focus on virtual schools, which minimize the costs of buildings, teachers, and staff. In Philadelphia, students in more than a dozen cyberschools failed state achievement tests. Offering a strong counterargument to charter school advocates such as David Osborne, Rooks proposes no easy answers: "our system," she writes, "will need to be almost completely overhauled and rethought." A convincing argument that the only viable, proven school reform strategy is integration, a solution distressingly difficult to achieve.

Kirkus Reviews