Caitlin Campbell

EMILY SETTON

onathan Kozol begins The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America with a warning that “the nation needs to be confronted with the crime that we're committing and the promises we are betraying.  This is a book about betrayal of the young, who have no power to defend themselves.  It is not intended to make readers comfortable.”  He isn't kidding.  Shame is an examination and indictment of the institutions and mentalities that perpetuate racial segregation in schools and allow staggering inequalities in educational opportunities between whites and blacks. 

In Shame, Kozol traces the collapse of the desegregation movement into a resurgence of what he calls “apartheid schools,” which exist in spite of Brown v. Board of Education.  Kozol doesn't attribute de facto segregation strictly to active malice, though he does condemn President George W. Bush's claim that he has made strides in education as a “devious appeasement of the heartaches of the parents of the black and brown and poor.” He instead emphasizes an equally dangerous sense of complacency, which pervades society and implicates even self-proclaimed liberals. Certain terms and concepts common to the debate over educational inequality reveal this complacency, such as the euphemistic dubbing of segregated, majority-black schools as “diverse” and the consensus that the infrastructure in many schools is so badly damaged that increased funding would have no effect. As Kozol demonstrates, modern segregation results not only from the enrollment of white students at expensive private schools, but also a growing exclusivity of public schools that are supplemented by grants, fundraisers and community taxes. In the interest of maintaining a “sense of neighborhood” and fundraising capabilities, middle-class white parents often pressure policy-makers to build schools and allocate funds in ways that, ultimately, perpetuate segregation. Poor black parents, lacking political clout, can't influence representatives in the same way. Even in the cases in which students might apply to transfer out of decrepit schools, parents are often unaware of this possibility, much less of the opportunity to apply to exclusive public magnet schools that accept only a small percentage of potential students.

Kozol suggests that segregation, and the insufficient funding that accompanies it, results in low salaries for teachers, an emphasis on standardized testing at the expense of true intellectual growth, large class sizes, appalling classroom conditions, fewer preschools, and career-oriented curricula that implicitly dismiss the possibility that minority students will go on to college.  For Kozol, increased funding is essential but insufficient.  He argues that attempts to improve schools without combating segregation “expand the vast divide between two separate worlds of future cognitive activity, public sagacity, social health and economic status, while they undermine the capability of children of minorities to thrive with confidence and satisfaction in the mainstream of American society.” Desegregation is necessary for significant and lasting change. 

  It isn't only the confrontation with these unpleasant truths that makes Shame a difficult read; the sheer bulk of evidence proves overwhelming, particularly for readers with little prior knowledge of the topic.  Kozol's combination of statistics, interviews, news citations and anecdotes from his years of teaching and visiting classrooms certainly provides ample substance, albeit sometimes at the expense of clear organization and argumentation.  He also has a tendency toward unscholarly sentimentality, although perhaps it is precisely this sentimentality that makes his arguments so compelling.  His interest in social inequality is intense and direct, based not on disinterested examinations of statistics and trends but instead on interactions with real children, for whom he attempts to find real solutions.

  Ultimately, the “shame” here is not only the state of schools in America but the need for a book like this.  While readers may be shocked by the extent to which segregation has progressed in many schools, most understand that schools dubbed “ghetto” are racially segregated.  It shouldn't have taken so long for someone to publicly apply the term “apartheid.”  It shouldn't be necessary for someone to highlight the hypocrisy of policy-makers who claim that increased funding would do little to improve the quality of struggling public schools while paying exorbitant rates to send their own children to elite private institutions.  It should go without saying that a country that venerates figures such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. cannot in good conscience allow segregation to continue, much less to intensify.  Unfortunately, it seems that we do need Kozol's eloquent and impassioned outcry against the inequalities that we have learned to accept.