Public schools are among America’s greatest achievements in modern history, yet from the earliest days of tax-supported education, there have been intractable tensions tied to race and poverty. In a Chats in the Stacks book talk, Noliwe Rooks, author of Cutting School (The New Press, September 2017) provides an analysis of our separate and unequal schools. According to Rooks, profiting from our nation’s failure to provide a high-quality education to all children has become a very big business. She discusses controversial topics such as school choice, teacher quality and the school-to-prison pipeline, and breaks down the fraught landscape of “segrenomics,” showing how experimental solutions to achievement gaps—including charters, vouchers, and cyber schools—rely on, profit from, and exacerbate racial and economic segregation under the guise of providing equal opportunity. Noliwe Rooks is associate professor in Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, Sexuality Studies; and director of the American Studies Program at Cornell University.
