Cutting School

<p><strong>2018 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction) Finalist<br /><br />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<br /><br />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. <em>Cutting School</em> puts our schools at the center of the fight for a new commons.<br />-Naomi Klein author of <em>No Is Not Enough </em>and <em>This Changes Everything<br /><br /></em></strong>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.<br /><br /><em>Cutting School</em> deftly traces the financing of segregated education in America from reconstruction through <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />A comprehensive compelling account of what's truly at stake in the relentless push to deregulate and privatize <em>Cutting School</em> is a cri de coeur for all of us to resist educational apartheid in America.</p>