The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

This is quintessential Kozol. No one familiar with any of Kozol's other work will fail to recognize the crusading journalistic stance that Kozol typically takes in his work. He does a lot of observation and describes what he sees. He also delves into the history, statistics and other backstory material behind the stories he presents. He moves from example to example, trying not to let too much commentary get in the way of letting the story present itself. But he makes no pretences of being "objective" or "unbiased". He clearly has an agenda, perhaps even a mission - one to expose the seamy underside of how the richest country on earth treats "the least of these my brethren".This time Kozol's focus is on the educational system and the de facto return of segregated schooling, especially in urban areas, and the failure of the dream of Brown v. the Board of Education, despite the fact that Brown is still nominally the law of the land. Kozol shines his spotlight on how it is that 60 years after the landmark Supreme Court case, many schools are nearly as segregated as they were the day the decision as handed down. In fact, segregation is once again worsening, as funding cuts are disproportionately impacting "low-performing" (usually high minority population) schools, leading the more affluent (white) to pull their children out. Furthermore, laws designed to promote integration and equitable funding are either sunsetting or are being overturned by the courts, and charter schools are arising that aggrevate the disparity between the "pedagogy of poverty", how poor and minority children are educated, vs. how affluent children are educated.Kozol spends page after page in the first two-thirds of the book documenting conditions he often finds when he visits schools in poor and minority neighborhoods: the lack of textbooks, the unsafe and unsanitary physical conditions from leaking roofs to unusable bathrooms to entire wings being shut off and condemned. He documents the "tortured dignity" of teachers who do their best to provide decent education and a positive influence to children under such conditions, but who struggle with burnout and top-down imposed "no excuses", rigidly controlled curricula and behavior management programs. One teacher, using the mandated system of silent hand gestures to control her class tells Kozol, "I could do this with my dog".But Kozol isn't merely saying that we need to provide better resources or more progressive curricula to poor and minority schools. He is saying that segregation itself is the problem. The conditions he documents would not be tolerated in schools serving predominantly white children. As the "Brown" court found, there is no such thing as "separate but equal". Segregated education is inherently harmful to the minority group (and, he hints, to the majority groups as well, albeit in different ways). Furthermore, Kozol spends nearly a chapter exploring the impact of a later Supreme Court decision, Rodriguez, which ruled that states are not obligated to provide "equal" education, merely to ensure that all students receive "adequate" instruction. Hence, we now are actually one step behind even the horrendous Plessy v. Ferguson decision because we no longer need to pretend to equality, only adequacy. One man's "adequate", however, is another man's "shameful".Some reviewers have criticized Kozol for being short on solutions. However, KOzol is quite explicit about his solution. Integration (along with the resultant equitable funding) is the only way the imbalances will ever be fairly worked out. Yes, in the meantime, poor and minority schools need to be made more human and progressive. All schools should receive equitable funding (Note: "equitable" does not mean "equal" - the funding should follow the need, such that schools in low-income neighborhoods should get more funding to deal with greater needs, which is exactly the opposite of the No Child Left Behind/Race to the Top system in which the most affluent schools are "rewarded" for having the highest test scores. But in Kozol's view, there should be neither low-income nor affluent schools, much less "black" or "white" schools, as integration is the key step.Not that such integration will come easily, nor will it just happen. It's going to involve a new mass movement, comparable to the Civil rights Movement. It's a matter of more and more people waking up to the reality of what's happening and deciding to do the right thing. O one can do it for us - for you or for me. It takes committed people working across geographical and socio-economic barriers. Funny, but when the current batch of "reformers" - the Michelle Rhees and the Bill Gates and the Sam Waltons of the world - claim that education is "the civil rights issue of our time", I don't think that that's really what they have in mind.The first step is to get informed and the second step is to get angry. Reading THE SHAME OF THE NATION can help kickstart both of those steps and I recommend it highly. But it can't end there. Too often the problem seems overwhelming, so we shrug our shoulders and focus on our own children. But Kozol sees inner-city poor and minority children as his children too, not someone else's problem. Race and socio-economic status may be obstacles, but they shouldn't be barriers. Our educational system should provide a quality education to all children - future voting citizens of our democracy - and should be the pride of the richest country on earth; it shouldn't be the shame of the nation.

I had to read this book for my interterm class. Needless to say, Kozol appears to be very passionate, and demonstrates excellent credibility in his field of expertise. He also uses many facts and statistics to back up his claims. He accurately shows how President Bush's well-meaning education plans have ultimately backfired, leading many teachers and principals to replace real education with a system that "teaches the tests" to their students. It made me uncomfortable to think about how I, as a white sophomore in college, have been lucky to receive the education I did, and in a facility that, while it was a middle-sized, somewhat dumpy campus in a small town, it was far better than the schools that Kozol describes. However, this book has some major flaws. For one thing, Kozol places nearly all the blame for these low-down urban schools on white conservative politicians, when there are actually various causes for these schools (parenting, family structure, urban culture, etc.). By doing this, he appears to emphasize an agenda that is all too commonly emphasized by Oprah Winfrey, Jesse Jackson, and their like-minded peers (racism is the cause of every problem we have, blacks are always oppressed by whites, our country is hopelessly racist, etc.). He also leaves the reader with little hope of actually being able to solve the problem in itself. Authors such as Peter Singer have addressed problems even more major than this, and yet have offered plausible, applicable solutions that leave their readers with a sense of hope. Here, Kozol's argument pretty much urges readers to shoot at a moving target.In summary, this book is good for learning about the problem of segregated ghetto schooling, but not good for finding any plausible solutions to it. Look elsewhere for authors who offer plausible solutions to this issue.

Clearly, the disparities in funding of public education for students in wealth and poor communities are disconcerting. Kozol evidences the conditions under which we educate poor and minority students with vivid and brutal anecdotes. For that reason alone, "Shame of the Nation" is a worthy read. However, I wish he spent more time investigating solutions. He hammers the point that the "white flight" of the middle class to the suburbs has left the poor and disenfranchised in the poor urban districts. He paints a vivid picture of schools that increasingly resemble factory production lines. But now what? He seems to hang his hat on racial integration. He argues that integration will fix all the ills, academic and social. He doesn't spend much time discussing past efforts at integration, such as busing. The trend continues unabated. Each time a new school is opened, the attendance zones become smaller and the homogeneity becomes more intense.Hopefully, writers like Kozol can keep the crisis on the front burner, and over time, we will be able to develop solutions. Somewhere, someone must have had some positive outcomes with low performing schools. I would like to hear more about those efforts.

Rigorous, clear-eyed, American prose essayist working in the best tradition of reportage. Kozol is one of my favourite writers and epitomizes the admirable side of America. His writing is so good and such a pleasure to read, that even if you are a dyed-in-the-wool right-winger, you will still appreciate his writing. And if you choose to dismiss him as bleeding-heart, "left-winger" then you will have failed to recognize that he embodies all the traditional values that have made America strong, admirable and truly great. What it used to be, and could still be if it re-discovers its past and its common sense.

Not so much history as a histrionic hissy fit of sad-face stories. Kozol started with his ideological agenda and then made everything fit it. What an utter waste of time. The race-baiting agenda is alive and well and making people like him rich. This is why our schools suck --- because education students are indoctrinated with crap like this.