A Question Burned Inside Me: A Guest Post by Bettina L. Love

In a powerful follow-up to her influential We Want To Do More Than Survive, Dr. Bettina L. Love shows education — whether you have children or not, are an educator or not — as integral to social justice and true democracy. Read on for an exclusive essay from Bettina L. Love on writing Punished for Dreaming.

I have been trying to write this book since the day I graduated high school. Back then, I had no idea I would one day become a college professor, researcher, and writer—I just had a lot of questions and no answers. That day plays in my head on repeat.

It’s graduation day. I’m 17 years old—nervous, but overwhelmed with joy as I prepare to walk across the stage. My entire family is smiling ear to ear. My high school held between 1,600 and 2,000 loud, ambitious, smart, funny, and creative students. My freshman class was just under 400. I can’t remember many of their faces, but I can still hear their laughter and see Black skin.

On graduation day, only 80 of us walked across that stage.

The auditorium, which could hold 400 joyful families, felt hollow. As I walked across the stage, I searched for all the smiles and hues of Brown and Black that had once filled the hallways.

I remember thinking to myself, Where is everyone?
I didn’t understand where they went—or why.
I hadn’t noticed nearly 300 classmates disappearing. But something in me knew they didn’t just vanish. They had been pushed out. Punished for being Black, young, and growing up in a zip code seen as undesirable and disposable.

That day, a question burned inside me, and I’ve been chasing answers ever since.

I wanted to understand what happened to those 300 students—and to kids like them across the country. I knew what happened in Rochester, NY wasn’t an anomaly. That graduation day sparked the fire in me to study race and educational policy.

That’s why I’m so proud of Punished for Dreaming—because it’s the book that finally answers the questions I had on that stage 30 years ago. I wrote this book for my generation. I hope it explains what happened to us—how the education system disposed of us, then used test scores, zero-tolerance policies, and school reform to justify our forced departure from our educational dreams.

Punished for Dreaming is a crucial book for understanding the last 40 years of educational harm—and how today’s political leaders are able to gut nearly every lever of justice within public education because the path was laid decades ago.

This book tells the stories of families who have experienced the full cruelty of education reform: the school-to-prison pipeline, high-stakes standardized testing, and students violently assaulted by police in schools. What we are witnessing now is not new—it’s the final act of gutting public education.

But the book doesn’t end there. It ends with a bold call: not just to fix our school system, but to reset our moral compass—through educational reparations.

If we believe the system has caused harm, then we must demand repair.
I hope those who read this book walk away thinking deeply about that repair—and what justice could truly look like.