66 pages • 2 hours read
Jonathan KozolThe Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Impact of Segregated Education on Children and Communities
In The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Kozol examines the damaging effects of segregated education on both Black and white communities. He argues that educational policies that keep children separated by race and socio-economic status increase the racial divide in American society by isolating children of color and leaving them unprepared to participate in mainstream American culture. By contrast, when children of different races attend school together, Kozol argues that society as a whole is made stronger.
As a young teacher in Boston’s segregated elementary schools, Kozol’s Black mentors taught him that desegregating schools was “the moral starting-point for all the rest” (5). Racially isolated children are shut out of many opportunities and confined to a “caste-and-color sequestration [that] divorced them from the mainstream of American society” (6). They don’t develop the confidence to interact with white people and are often unaware of many important cultural markers. According to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, segregated education “generates a feeling of inferiority as to [children’s] status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone” (29). The more children of color are segregated and treated differently, the more white society becomes sure that they are, in fact, different, and “it begins to seem not only sensible but maybe even ethically acceptable to isolate them as completely as we can” (272). Racist beliefs and stereotypes are allowed to flourish unchecked, and society becomes ever more divided.
In spite of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Kozol argues that, decades later, schools are just as segregated as they were back then. He argues that integrated schooling is key to creating a more just society because it’s where children learn that they are not so different from one another. They can normalize interacting with one another and dissolve any fear of the other. If these interactions don’t happen until later in life, Kozol worries that “the sweetness of too many of these inner-city children” is “corroded” and “replaced by hardness, […] caution, […] calculation rooted in unspoken fear” (11). He shares many examples of the positive effects of integration, such as Roger Wilkins’s claim that his education in an integrated high school gave him “an ease around white people that made the rest of [his] life possible” (239). Principals residing over diverse student bodies report that their students “like who goes to school with [them]” (219). Despite “initial fears” from “people of both races,” there is “a strange phenomenon—normality, humanity” that makes these fears disappear when children get to know one another as peers (234). Children in desegregated schools carry these experiences and friendships into adulthood, going on to live more “racially mixed” lives and breaking down the racial lines that define American society.
The Role of Public Policy in Shaping Educational Opportunities
As Kozol describes the different factors that influence public education in the United States, he explores the important role of public policy in shaping educational opportunities or the lack thereof. Kozol illustrates how public policy often addresses the symptoms of an unequal system without making efforts to change the system itself. As often as not, public policy works to keep segregated systems in place and even actively opposes efforts to integrate American schools.
Most public policies relating to education offer “in the box” solutions that address the symptoms of inequality in public schools but stop short of proposing systemic change, effectively enforcing a “separate but equal” agenda. Although “official culture honors” civil rights victories like Brown v. Board of Education, “official actions and the policies of school boards […] fiercely disavow” it (30). Instead of promoting integration, programs like No Child Left Behind work to “improve” impoverished urban schools with rigorous accountability measures like testing and drills-based curricula. These policies impute individual responsibility to a systemic problem, placing pressure on students and teachers to do better without giving them the resources they need to make genuine progress. While this sometimes results in higher test scores, they are rarely “authentic education gains” that carry over to subsequent grades or increased graduation rates (280). Nor do accountability programs work to address the other issues that accompany segregated education, like the exclusion of children of color from mainstream American culture.
Furthermore, some of the policies actively limit local attempts to integrate. In some cases, the US Department of Education has mandated that “priorities” like reducing class size or observing desegregation orders “will have to be subordinated to the stipulations of No Child Left Behind” (266). The possibility of public policy that promotes equal educational opportunities is also limited by the Supreme Court’s moves “limiting desegregation” and “actively dismantling existing integration programs” (19). Decisions like San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez have made national legislation to ensure equal school funding all but impossible, and decisions limiting affirmative action programs have caused Black enrollment in universities to fall. Moreover, city planning policies in many cities also work to cement racial isolation and ensure the segregation of school districts.
Kozol argues that current public policies in education “expand the vast divide between two separate worlds of future cognitive activity, political sagacity, social health and economic status, while they undermine the capability of children of color to thrive with confidence and satisfaction in the mainstream of American society” (284). Most successful attempts at integration and educational equality occur despite public policy, not because of it.
The Moral and Ethical Dimensions of Equitable Education
In The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Kozol presents the segregation of public schools as a moral failing on the part of the United States. Kozol contends that the idea that a child’s educational opportunities are defined by their race and socioeconomic status is fundamentally unjust, and American society has “a moral obligation” to rectify these practices.
Kozol explains how the government “place[s] a price tag” on children’s foreheads before they even begin school (49), determining what their education is worth and how much preschool they are entitled to. Kindergarteners in the Bronx might be “$8,000 babies,” while children in the suburbs are worth $18,000. These discrepancies, based only on race and zip code, are fundamentally unfair and have life-long effects on the opportunities these children receive.
When it comes to fighting these practices, Kozol claims that the country is “morally exhausted” after the upheaval of the Civil Rights Movement and doesn’t want to confront the ethical dilemma of segregation. Therefore, the “racial isolation” in which many urban schools exist is rarely mentioned when policies are proposed to “improve” underperforming schools. Indeed, the racial isolation of certain populations is so complete that much of mainstream white society can easily avoid confronting inequality. The worlds of the poor and affluent rarely intersect, so more well-to-do sectors of American society can willfully ignore their complicity in an unequal system.
Affluent parents will often concede that “life isn’t fair” when pressed on the inequalities in public education, then “pocket [their] qualms” and do whatever is necessary to secure good educations for their children. Although they rarely express explicitly racist beliefs, their actions imply that their children are somehow more deserving of a good education and high-quality facilities than an inner-city child. Furthermore, actions like the private subsidy of public schools that occur in wealthy districts “denounces an ideal of simple justice that is often treated nowadays as […] an ethical detritus that sophisticated parents are encouraged to shut out of mind as they adapt themselves to a new order of Darwinian entitlements” (55).
While urban schools are held to “higher standards, higher expectations […] far lower standards certainly in ethical respects appear to be expected of the dominant society that isolates these children in unequal institutions” (34). According to many of the teachers and school officials that Kozol speaks to, the first step to tackling the injustice of segregated education is to make it visible and hold “the dominant society” accountable. As one teacher argues: “We need to speak the word ‘racism’ clearly” (215). Similarly, many others call for a “political movement” to bring public awareness to the issue of inequality and racial discrimination in public schools.
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