Across the country, the closure of public schools in historically Black and Brown neighborhoods has been sold to the public as “reform.” Politicians and privatizers claim these closures are about performance and efficiency. But if you’ve spent any time in these communities, you know that the story they tell is not the story we’ve lived. That’s why What We Stand to Lose by Kristen Buras is more than a book. It’s a reckoning.

I’ve long admired Kristen Buras as a scholar-activist who refuses to separate her research from the communities it’s meant to serve. In this new release, she offers a powerful, deeply researched, and emotionally resonant counter-story to the narrative of failure that has been used to justify the dismantling of neighborhood public schools and the erasure of Black educators.

The heart of the book is George Washington Carver Senior High School in New Orleans—a school founded in 1958 and shuttered in 2005. Through oral histories and archival documents, Buras brings to life a vibrant institution that, despite being under-resourced and marginalized by systemic racism, became a center of academic excellence, cultural pride, and intergenerational mentorship. At Carver, Black teachers built a self-determined educational culture that pushed back against the odds and created a sustaining legacy for generations of students.

That legacy, like so many others across the U.S., was not simply lost—it was deliberately dismantled. Buras carefully and courageously documents how policies driven by racial supremacy and profit-driven reformers led to the erasure of institutions like Carver. She also highlights how Black teachers—once the backbone of public education in communities of color—have been targeted, blamed, and replaced in the wake of school closures and charter expansions. In doing so, she reminds us that the struggle over public education is not just about test scores or governance. It is about memory. It is about justice. It is about who gets to shape the future.

As someone who has spent years researching education reform in New Orleans and beyond, I can say without hesitation: this book is essential reading. It challenges us to think deeply about the costs of school closures and who bears them. It also reminds us that the stories of Black teachers must be central—not peripheral—to any serious discussion about educational equity.

If you’ve ever asked what’s really behind the wave of school closures in America’s cities, or why veteran Black educators have been disappearing from our classrooms, Buras gives you the answer, not in abstract theories, but in lived experience, community testimony, and institutional history. She names the violence for what it is. And she does it with rigor and love.

Kristen Buras’s What We Stand to Lose is more than a defense of one school, it is a declaration that Black teachers and their communities matter. That their stories must be heard. That their erasure must not go unchallenged. The book is available now through Bookshop.org, your local indie bookstore, and Barnes & Noble. Share it, teach with it, talk about it. Let’s make sure that what we stand to lose is not lost without a fight.