The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
Kozol, Jonathan (2005).
New York: Crown Publishers; 404 pages. $25.00. ISBN 1400052440.
Noted educational reformer Jonathan Kozol’s latest book, The Shame of the Nation, is a renewed call for reform of public education because of the resegregation of public schools and the shameful conditions in inner-city schools. This book is based upon his visits to visits to 60 public schools in 30 districts in 11 states over the period 2000-2005, with references to earlier narratives. Kozol, now nearly 70 years old, strikes familiar themes. As in his earlier works like Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities, and Amazing Grace, he finds inner-city schools characterized by student bodies almost entirely composed of poor, minority children, many of them immigrants, trapped in overcrowded classrooms in dilapidated buildings, often taught by unqualified and substitute teachers, lacking adequate books and equipment, and in districts significantly underfunded in comparison to elite city schools and affluent suburban and mostly white school districts.
Citing the recent research of the Civil Rights Project of Harvard University (www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu) led by fellow educational reformer Gary Orfield, Kozol decries the resegregation of public schools in the United States.1 This is emphasized in conversations that he has in the book with civil rights leaders Roger Wilkins and Congressman John Lewis, who lament the reaction against the gains of the civil rights movement in the era of racial integration. Kozol points out the irony of the abysmal conditions, the lack of learning, and the very high drop-out rates in schools named for such late civil rights leaders as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. Kozol places much of the blame for the plight of poor, minority students on this pattern of racial resegregation. This is repeatedly underscored in his descriptions of schools in cities like New York City and Los Angeles and also in a black suburban school district on Long Island.
In addition to racial segregation, Kozol points to several other policies as the causes for the academic underachievement of students in most inner-city public schools. These include: 1) the overemphasis on rote learning to pass standardized proficiency tests, especially since the passage of the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” program; 2) the adoption of rigid, scripted curricula such as “Scripted for All”; and 3) the failure of the states to institute more equalized funding for public schools despite numerous and continued lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of inequitable funding. Interestingly, he does not devote much space to discussing the charter school and school voucher alternatives to public education that have been opposed by teachers’ unions and others. He does analyze small school experiments, however. Kozol points to efforts to return many inner-city minority students to vocational rather than academic tracks and to prepare them for jobs through school-to-work curricula, rather than expose them to actual learning, as harmful.
Kozol’s heroes are young children who still shine as students despite their environments, heroic teachers like Louis Bedrock, a longtime teacher at an elementary school in the Bronx, to whom he dedicates the book, and principals like Aida Rosa at the same school where Bedrock teaches. While Kozol avoids prescriptions, he does mention a few inter-district programs in metropolitan areas like Boston, Louisville, Milwaukee, and St. Louis as showing that mixing poor children with middle-class, suburban students has positive results for both groups.
The conservative Manhattan Institute (www.manhattan-institute.org) provides a counterpoint to Kozol’s analysis, one that has become much more prominent in affecting educational policies than Kozol’s. Its fellows like Sol Stern and Abigail Thernstrom have reviewed Kozol’s books and arguments and derided them as wrong-headed. Stern, for example, has called Kozol a dangerous leftist for his views, including those espoused in his book entitled Children of the Revolution on Cuban education.
While there is little prospect for the adoption of policies like metropolitan-wide school programs to overcome racial segregation or state-sponsored school financing reforms to eliminate funding inequalities, there does seem to be increasing debate over the effectiveness and utility of the No Child Left Behind testing program tied to federal funding. For Kozol, a more realistic title might be “Millions of Inner-City, Minority Children Left Behind.”
Endnote
1. For a different perspective on the topic of school resegregation, see the article by Logan, Oakley and Stowell elsewhere in this issue – The CYE Editors.
Reviewer Information
Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University
Dennis Keating is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Urban Studies, and Associate Dean of the Levin College at Cleveland State University. His research interests include housing and neighborhoods. He co-authored a chapter in A Right to Housing: Foundations of a New Social Agenda (Temple University Press, 2006).