**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.
