Though President Trump has used his second term in office to paint the teaching of critical race theory as a “racist” pedagogy of “anti-white indoctrination” in order to justify the Department of Education’s curricular interventions within our nation’s public school classrooms, his administration has failed to acknowledge a 2022-2023 case study funded by the Ford Foundation, which documented punitive on-campus/out-of-class carceral policies and practices being deployed against minoritized elementary school students in Northern California. Published in The Reading Teacher journal in early 2025, Stanford University scholar Rubén A. González, and Buffalo University researcher Brittany L. Jones quoted one 4th-grade student who participated in the study’s Freedom Dreaming literacy unit, who said, “They treat us like we’re in prison!”
The study involved a two-week long English language arts unit—Freedom Dreaming—comprised of daily 60-minute intervals of literacy instruction which worked toward a group project. The unit presented select historical anchor texts about past injustices, encouraged students to embody those historical lessons by mapping problems they could identify on campus, and then asked them to imagine solutions to those problems that might foster a better future. Essentially, the unit availed a real-life civics lesson which mobilized students to use their own agency to improve their learning environment.
Comprised of 25 students—95% BIPoC, 60% qualified for free/reduced lunch, 14 girls/11 boys—the class collectively agreed to abolish the school-wide policy and practice requiring students to quietly walk in a straight line according to a yellow piece of tape running down the middle of the school’s hallways. Students who failed to abide by this protocol—by talking or walking in pairs—could lose recess and lunch time.
“Adults shouldn’t be controlling our bodies—we’re getting in trouble for no real reason, just like how police treat people of Color,” said one male student.
Following two weeks of on-campus activism involving a Student Council speech, hanging posters, and a letter-writing campaign, the Freedom Dreaming students convinced the school administration to abolish the policy.
“Freedom dreaming helped us learn how to make a change,” said one female student.
To be sure, the Freedom Dreaming study examined practices occurring during the Biden administration, affirming how abolitionist practices are rooted in a rejection of what Professor Dylan Rodriguez calls the “liberal police state,” and challenge what Professor Erica R. Meiners describes as the “carceral logics, policies and practices in schools.” Though teachers unions have historically funded the Democrat National Committee, and Democrat candidates tout school funding as one of their foundational priorities, the nation’s woeful literacy outcomes for K-12 students indicts the systemic teaching failure undergirding the punitive practices the Freedom Dreaming study examines. Instead of improving the quality of instruction within the classroom, the punitive policing of children outside the classroom has become a slight-of-hand pretext for distracting critics from the pedagogic failure teachers–and their liberal political representatives–must account for.
Denying children access to lunch and recess, regardless of the pretext, doesn’t just constitute “off the books” forms of punishment that go undocumented—they are illegal, and constitute child abusew. Denying children access to lunch and recess because they dare to walk next to one another (instead of in a militarized column), or have the audacity to talk to one another as they move between classes, is as indefensible—and inhumane—as using tax dollars to fund the use of wooden paddles to deliver corporal punishment to children.
Conservatives who railed over the Covid lockdowns instituted by liberal politicians, and urge parents to resist woke School Boards in service of their children’s safety, shouldn’t fear abolitionist teachings, because they impart the critical thinking skills that all parents hope their children acquire. Ironically, principled radicality embraces the very freedom goals most Republicans claim to care about; indeed, radical teachings rooted in historical injustices inspired the study’s mostly BIPoC students to resist an overbearing school policy which most self-identified MAGA supporters would oppose being applied to their children, had their children been subjected to it. Though the policy was applied in a race-neutral manner, it was objectively oppressive.
Imagine the parents of predominately white students attending a mostly middle class suburban elementary school, tolerating their children being denied lunch and recess, because they talked to one another while walking in pairs in the halls. Apart from private schools, such a policy would not stand in a contemporary public school setting. Unfortunately, advocates of teaching culturally-sustaining prison abolition literacies in public schools have not adequately seized upon the exemplar this study offers, and properly leveraged its utility more broadly. Surly, similarly punitive practices pervade white elementary schools.
Were abolitionist teachers to replicate the Freedom Dreaming literacy unit within hundreds of white schools as civics projects that bring Social Studies to life, and teach white children how to challenge the punitive practices that liberal reformers have built around them (creating good little radicals), insurgency just might come to model the very pedagogical revolution we need. Sometimes you have to seed the revolution outside the wire, in order to turn your oppressor into your advocate.
By any means.
Read the Freedom Dreaming study here.
