This is an absolute must read, especially for educators, parents, and just anyone who has ever heard phrases like “school choice,” “education reform,” or “accountability” without knowing the history behind them. It was fascinating, infuriating, heartbreaking, and incredibly illuminating, and its left me thinking very differently about the educational policies I see playing out in my home state of Florida and throughout the country.

This was phenomenal and filled in so many gaps in my understanding of “education reform.” Love meticulously details decades of US education policy and exposes how those policies, which are presented as reform, school choice, opportunities for marginalized communities, but have repeatedly harmed Black children. She made a great argument in how these policies connect across decades from Brown v board and the Reagan era, to testing, school policing, charter schools, and school vouchers, and explained how the language of reform disguises the same underlying anti-blackness.

As someone born and raised in Florida, I found the history surrounding school choice and voucher systems particularly compelling. Living here, I’ve seen the GOP consistently push school reform through vouchers and privatization, so reading the historical context behind these policies was very insightful and equally enraging. Love helped me understand that these ideas did not emerge in a vacuum or simply because policymakers suddenly decided parents deserved “choice.” She traces how school choice and vouchers have a much longer history tied to resistance to desegregation and the preservation of unequal educational structures.

I also appreciated that Love complicates the political narrative by showing that the problem cannot simply be reduced to Republicans versus Democrats. She examines how Republicans and establishment liberals alike have embraced different versions of education reform, often using the language of opportunity, accountability, innovation, or helping poor children, while still supporting policies that reproduce racial and economic inequality.

Love really delivered on her whole vision of the transforming the education system through abolition and creating one centered on liberation, healing, joy, educational freedom, and what she calls “educational reparations”.