ST. PETERSBURG –The St. Petersburg Branch NAACP, in partnership with the Legal Defense Fund and St. Petersburg College, hosted Dr. Noliwe Rooks last Friday and Saturday as she discussed the state of the educational system and her latest book, “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education.”
Rooks, an interdisciplinary scholar whose work explores how race and gender both impact and are impacted by civic culture, social history and political life in the United States, has taught at Cornell and Princeton. Her book “Cutting School” explores the history of tax-supported education in this country and analyzes the separate and unequal approaches to educating children of different races.
Rooks related that while she was teaching at Princeton University, many of her white students realized a discrepancy with the relatively low number of black and Hispanic students at the esteemed university. Since many of the white students came from similar backgrounds and were often educated in the best school systems the country has to offer—from middle school to high school, private schools to elite high-performing public schools—it created a sense of uniformity that Rooks didn’t always see among the black, Latino and first-generation students.
Read the article in The Weekly Challenger
