S1-E5: Cutting School, Listening to Communities (Noliwe Rooks)

At the beginning of her most recent book, Dr. Noliwe Rooks shares a conversation she had over and over with her white, affluent students at Princeton. They called education “the civil rights issue of our time,” and seemed eager and committed to eradicating educational inequity. Rooks quickly noticed that for all their enthusiasm, few of her students had actually visited the underserved schools and neighborhoods they wanted to help or talked to the parents, students, and educators there. When Rooks brought up this type of engagement, they seemed dismissive of the idea that it was even necessary.

In today’s conversation, Dr. Rooks shares how these repetitive conversations reflect broad rhetoric in the education reform movement and historical patterns in the racialized history of education in the U.S. She shares the concept of “segrenomics,” economic and business models that require segregation to produce profits. She describes the great lengths that formerly-enslaved people in the rural south took to build schools in their communities, why white philanthropists took all the credit, and how similar patterns echo in today’s education politics. Rooks explores all the reasons why, if we ever hope to serve our most marginalized communities as bureaucrats, we need to engage meaningfully and continuously with community members who’ve been organizing, teaching, and fighting for education resources for decades.