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

In Chapter 9, Kozol explores some options for resisting the segregation of public schools. In an essay for Time magazine called “Why We Need to Raise Hell,” columnist Jack White argues that “we should have tried [integration]” before giving up on it (216). White claims that white Americans and “privileged African Americans” abandoned “the struggle” for integration “long before it was won” (216). He proposes “reviv[ing] the civil rights movement,” knowing it “would be disruptive and strongly opposed” (216), but argues that it is the only way to motivate meaningful change.

Many of the teachers that Kozol speaks with express their “political impatience” with the public school system. Many of them came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and are faced with the continued reality of segregation in their classrooms. Some principals also speak out, even sacrificing their jobs in protest of policies that promote further segregation. For example, Kozol describes David Engle, a high school principal in Seattle who resigned in 2002 after courts reversed a “tie-breaker” policy that allowed public schools to factor in race during admissions to encourage desegregation. He saw how children of different races liked going to school together and noticed how it strengthened the surrounding community.

Other principals and superintendents echo this sentiment. Kozol refers to Duncan Pritchett, the superintendent of the Indianapolis public schools, who describes watching “fear dissolve” as children of different races got to know one another at school.

As Kozol travels the country and talks to educators, he asks, “Where, within the limits of the possible, should we direct whatever time and energy we have?” (221). According to Gary Orfield, the author of several books and studies on desegregation and resegregation, “a political movement is a necessary answer” (221). He argues that Black and white adults who have experienced the benefits of desegregated schooling must be “challenged […] to act.” When Kozol mentions the challenge of integrating districts with a huge Black and Hispanic majority, Orfield describes “interdistrict busing programs” that sent a number of inner-city children to suburban schools and suburban children to urban schools. He also describes “strategies to break the back of segregated housing patterns in the suburbs, one of the most impenetrable obstacles to school desegregation” (224).

Orfield argues for desegregating neighborhoods by encouraging families with Section Eight certificates to look for housing outside segregated neighborhoods. Towns and cities, Orfield suggests, could build more multifamily housing that would accept Section Eight certificates, and “fair-minded citizens” should pressure their municipalities to do this. Most importantly, people need to “step outside the box” that “schools as they are, poor children where they are” (224-25). They must stop thinking about what to do with inner-city schools and begin thinking about how to change the system.

To close the chapter, Kozol addresses successful examples of transfer programs to desegregate schools. Some of these programs began under court order, while others started voluntarily. The programs allow a number of inner-city and suburban students to transfer between districts and, therefore, diversify the student body. The results in these schools have been overwhelmingly positive, and school leaders and community members staunchly defend these transfer programs when threatened. Instead of merely trying to raise scores among Black children, integration programs address the need to “[give] Black children access to majority culture, so they could negotiate it more confidently” (229). Kozol describes how students in these transfer programs make friends with white children, attend college, and “frequently lead social lives and have professional careers in racially mixed settings” (230).

However, Kozol also describes the threats to these programs, which require significant funding. When this funding is cut, some districts have no choice but to close the transfer programs. Meanwhile, surveys reveal that the American public favors desegregated education. Whatever “social obstacles” children face in the process of desegregation, Kozol describes how “a strange phenomenon—normality, humanity—kicks in” (234); the children become friends, and “we are better, as a nation, for the consequence” (234).

Orfield argues that one need not “start with the hardest cases in the country” to challenge segregation in public schools (235). In fact, it is better to start “where the obstacles are of an order of far lesser magnitude” (236), tackling less segregated cities and suburbs before places like the Bronx with almost complete racial isolation. Kozol agrees that “the overall scale of racial isolation in New York is so extreme that it is hard to build political optimism” (236), and he suggests we begin looking elsewhere for solutions.

While segregation in public schools is a national problem in the United States, Kozol states that there has been little in the way of a national response.

Kozol opens the chapter with a conversation with Roger Wilkins, “[o]ne of the most enduringly respected figures in the older generation of black intellectuals” (237). Wilkins argues that desegregating public schools “is going to be enormously more difficult than the dismantling of apartheid in the South” (237). He describes the “massive desolation of the intellect and spirits and the human futures of these millions of young people” as “a national horror hidden in plain view” (238); another political movement is needed to “make it visible.” Wilkins describes his own childhood attending “an almost totally white high school” in Michigan (238). While the experience was at times difficult, he learned “that whites were not ‘a master race,’ and not all devils either, but that they were ordinary people” (239). This illustrates the value of desegregated education, but Wilkins admits the difficulty of reopening the issue. The nation, he suggests, is “morally exhausted” after the upheaval of the Civil Rights Movement and no longer wants to think of the “racist beliefs” and “supporting structures” that make up modern society.

Reflecting on this conversation, Kozol wonders if school segregation is a “national horror,” like Wilkins claimed, “Why was there no national response?” (240). Programs like No Child Left Behind attempted to implement national educational techniques and standards but did not mention or address the structural inequality affecting American schoolchildren.

One reason for the lack of a national response dates back to 1973 when the US Supreme Court overruled a case of inequalities in education finance. Demetrio Rodriguez had filed a class-action suit against the San Antonio school district, arguing that discrepancies in Texas’s public-school funding were discriminatory and unconstitutional. Poor districts with mostly students of color received $37 per student, while wealthier and whiter districts received as much as $543 per student. A federal district court in San Antonio ruled that Texas had violated the Constitution's equal protection clause, which mandates that individuals be treated equally under the law. Rodriguez’s lawyers argued that education “is a prerequisite to exercise of speech and voting rights” (242). However, when appealed to the Supreme Court, Justice Lewis Powell argued that education is not “afforded explicit protection under our Federal Constitution” (242), and furthermore, the children did not experience “absolute deprivation”; they still had access to public education, just at a lower quality than other children. Powell argued that “we have never presumed to possess either the ability or the authority to guarantee […] the most effective speech or the most informed electoral choice” (243). He also questioned the link between spending and the quality of education.

Dissenting Justice Thurgood Marshall argued that education was a “related interest” that should be “afforded special judicial consideration” due to its relationship with other constitutional rights like free speech (243). He also reiterated the words of Brown v Board of Education, arguing that something provided by the state “must be made available to all on equal terms” (244). The case was turned down, which meant that no further legal opposition to unequal education finance could use the US Constitution in their argument; all these battles had to be fought at the state level, requiring an incredible amount of time and effort to duplicate “these efforts in state after state” (248).

Since the passage of San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez, 45 states have seen legal actions against inequality in education spending; however, even when the plaintiffs won their cases, little action resulted. Across the country, school districts with poor children of color receive less funding than more affluent, white districts. Data on this “funding gap” is published yearly by the Education Trust, yet even though the path to close the gap is “relatively straightforward and well known” (246), the average inequality nationwide continues to widen.

Kozol notes that the problem has become so pervasive that many attorneys no longer seek equal but rather “sufficient” funding for impoverished schools. In New York City, Michael Rebell is the director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity and argues for “the logic of renouncing equity as an objective and, instead, pursuing what is now described as ‘adequate provision’” (247). New York has “relatively high” standards and adequate provision would require every school to be given resources to meet these standards. However, even getting “an adequate education in every school” is “a huge battle” and leaves much still to be done (248).

Another way to return the issue of unequal education to the federal level is through legislative processes in Congress. One such bill called for the government “to hold states accountable for making sure that children in all districts are provided with the resources they need to meet […] high demands” imposed by standards and testing (250). If states did not meet the requirements of certain “educational necessities” like “safe facilities” and “small classes,” they would be required to illustrate “adequate yearly progress” toward meeting the requirements (250).

In another instance, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. introduced a proposed amendment to the Constitution enshrining “high-quality” public education as a fundamental right. This amendment “would essentially strike down Rodriguez” (251) and rectify the “patchwork system of school funding” across the country (252). Congressman Jackson argues that “race and class […] are at the heart of these inequalities,” and a constitutional amendment is the only way to bring about lasting change (252).

In fact, most Americans are surprised to learn that education is not a constitutional right, and civil rights attorney Theodore Shaw describes the state and local control of education policy as “so out of line with the realities of our society as to be obsolete” (253). However, a legislative solution or constitutional amendment could take decades to pass, and its implementation “would still depend upon the disposition of the federal courts […] and of the states and local districts to comply with its demands” (254). Even victories that have already been achieved in courts around the country are slow to take effect or never materialize at all. Furthermore, differences in individual states’ definitions of “an adequate education” mean that “children in some states will still receive an education only “half as adequate” as children in another state with more resources” (256). It is “a hopelessly outdated and inherently unequal way to educate a nation” (257).

Despite the many issues with statewide legal cases, Kozol points out that they sometimes serve to make the public more aware of the “extreme inequities” in public education. However, these statewide cases rarely “create the ferment needed for a serious political upheaval” (257). For one, Kozol argues that “adequacy” isn’t exactly an inspiring cause. Furthermore, these cases rarely address the issue of racial isolation and its impact on children’s education. Lawyers will sometimes “make allusions” to Brown v. Board of Education, indicating “the morally commanding stature of that ruling” (260), but Brown is unequivocal in its conclusion that segregation denies children of color equal educational opportunities, stating that “[i]n the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” (260).

However, separate but equal is exactly what many of these lawyers are now fighting for. Children of color are bound by an “uneven social contract” in which they are held to national standards but not supported by their nation. Kozol argues that “it is well past the time for us to start the work that it will take to change this,” and we must be prepared to pay whatever the cost will be (264).