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| The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
Paperback
Author: Jonathan Kozol
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Release Date: 2006-08-01
ISBN-10: 1400052459
ISBN-13: 9781400052455
List Price: $14.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Over the last 15 years, the state of inner-city public schools has been in a steep and continuing decline. Since the federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, segregation of black children has reverted to its highest level since 1968. In many inner-city schools, a stick-and-carrot method of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons is now used with students. Meanwhile, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions, liberal education has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society.
Filled with the passionate voices of children, principals, and teachers, and some of the most revered leaders in the black community, The Shame of the Nation pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems by the Bush administration. In their place, Kozol offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some 50 years ago to all our youngest citizens.
All analogies few statistics
| Customer Rating: |
Sheesh....if Kozol is suppose to be some type of expert in public education, you think he would have marshaled a few facts to bolster his case. If, as other reviewers assert, the target audience for this book is the comfortable suburban parents and schools, then the book has failed. Suburbanites are sophisticated enough to require valid data to support an argument. Kozol offers nothing but anecdote and appeals to emotion. Not very convincing. |
Zsa Zsa Gabor, Where Are You?
| Customer Rating: | | Kozol's got this rag doll in his mouth and won't let go. Who can blame him? The schools are in bad shape and, one supposes, someone is at fault. Why not blame everyone except the students? An alternative perspective might suggest the rise of a new phenomenon rarely mentioned by those advocating increased funding: Willful ignorance and the cult of pride. I work in the inner city. Many of my students refuse to do anything and are backed up by their parents. "You can't make me" is their slogan. No administrator will back up a teacher who assigns homework to kids who won't do it. The kids come to school three days a week and routinely take 6-weeks to visit their grandparents south of the border. The girls wear $100 nail jobs, $150 tennis shoes, and won't carry their books because they have bad backs. 25% of the kids stay home on rainy days. Charter schools make the rules the public schools refuse. The kids drop out because they won't accept discipline programs based on "consequences." After years in the local PS, they can't cope with being forced to take responsibility. No doubt, Kozol knows well that some schools have more lap tops than others. This may be a "savage inequality," but for the life of me I can't see how a lap top is going to make up for the lack curiosity in students devoted to gang culture. |
Thought-Provoking but Uneven
| Customer Rating: | Jonathan Kozol is very good at exposing the shameful conditions of inner city schools serving an overwhelmingly poor and minority student population. As after I read his earlier book "Savage Inequalities" a number of years ago, I came away shocked at just how bad things still are for so many of this nation's schoolchildren.
Kozol's solution to all the problems facing urban schools is simply to fund them at the same level as the wealthiest suburbs. There is no examination of whether that funding target is appropriate, which is a very important question. Perhaps the ritzy suburbs are spending too much and wasting money on frills such as lavish sports facilities and so on. It's one thing if the residents in that community are willing to pay for those frills but quite another to ask the overburdened taxpayer to provide the same to all schools.
Kozol takes the typical educrat position on all the hot button issues, from vouchers to standardized testing to phonics to gifted & talented programs (all of these are bad in his view) to universal government-run preschool (good in his view). He doesn't provide much in the way of convincing data to support his arguments, which suggests that they are based on ideology rather than sound research. |
Fighting for America's Second Class Citizens
| Customer Rating: | After his time spent as an educator, Jonathan Kozol devoted his career to that of an educational reform activist. He has visited what seems like thousands of schools throughout the United States and the communities that make up those schools to bear witness to the shameful secret that lies hidden in plain sight. Kozol's message in "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America" is not too different from the message he has written about in previous books - America still has 'second class citizens' who do not receive the same schooling, services, opportunities, rights, the same anything that the white majority does. With his argument that school integration has regressed to a level almost on par with the school segregation that existed before Brown vs. Board of Education, his message is a wake up call to anyone in education and to any American citizen.
As a teacher I have witnessed what Kozol writes about firsthand. I taught in a de facto segregated school that exhibited the classic signs of neglect Kozol mentions - antiquated building, overcrowded classrooms, military-style discipline, heavy emphasis on test preparation - the list goes on and on. I've witnessed firsthand the trials and tribulations that children of color and poverty can often bring to the classroom, only to have their education shortchanged as well. Kozol's plea is passionate; it is a shame that America continues to have segregated schools and that some school districts do whatever they can to guarantee that minorities are excluded all the while claiming that race isn't the issue. It is a shame that minority children have to go to classes in condemned buildings and that their curriculum is centered almost solely around raising test scores in math and reading to meet government demands. How can they meet those expectations when they do not receive the same education as the majority students? It is a shame that the landmark decision of Brown vs. Board of Education has failed and we still hail it as a triumph. It is a shame that schools named for courageous civil rights leaders are segregated schools, bearing witness to the exact opposite of what these leaders hoped to bring about. It is a shame that too few seem to care about these issues and that it may take a movement even larger than the civil rights movement to make any changes. It is a shame that some fail to recognize still that separate is never equal.
Why should those who have the most receive the most (in terms of education and opportunities) while those who have not or have the least receive the least? This is a question that one elementary student posed to the author. He was saddened that the only response he could give her was that after numerous years of asking that same question, he didn't have any good answer for it. Perhaps there never will be one. And even though that is one issue other reviewers have raised with "The Shame of the Nation", there are limited answers or suggestions Kozol can give with the state that education is in today. One author and the teachers and principals and government officials that he interviews cannot give a simple answer to a complex problem that is sadly most likely never going away and that will only continue to get worse. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., America will never be a first class nation while it still has second class citizens. If we are failing our children in their education, how are they ever going to be prepared to succeed in life? |
Educating "Jim Crow's Children"
| Customer Rating: | Jonathan Kozol's "The Shame of the Nation" is an insightful analysis into the re-segregation of America's schools.
Kozol spends an equal amount of time examining the root causes for the re-segregation of America's school as well as the on-the-ground effects that re-segregation has wrought.
The analysis regarding the root causes is pretty near flawless. Kozol rightfully excoriates those who have abandoned the promise of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. He also rightfully pinpoints the moment in legal history where the momentum of Brown v. Board of Education was reversed in the Supreme Court case of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. For a more in-depth treatment of the broken promises of Brown v. Board of Education, one should read Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools by Jonathan Kozol and Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision by Peter Irons. Instead, Kozol points out that America's educational system has reverted back to a perverted Plessy v. Ferguson "separate but equal" system allegedly discredited by Brown v. Board of Education.
For the teachers locked inside this system, Kozol depicts the demoralizing impacts the system has upon its students, its teachers and its administrators.
Kozol's solution appears to be twofold: (1) reform from inside the system and (2) completing what was started in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's. One gets the feeling that Kozol is not altogether sanguine about either prong of the solution. Reforming the inside of the system would require a concerted effort on the part of teachers, administrators (and even students) and becomes more difficult each and every day in an era in which schools and school districts are receiving less and less resources. Re-starting the Civil Rights movement seems even less likely given the inertness of politics at almost every layer of government and the large degree of escapism afforded to the citizenry of the United States (internet, tv, movies, video games, etc.).
Kozol wonders aloud why Brown v. Board of Education is celebrated and it is clear that the answer is that it allows America to soothe its collective conscience to celebrate the "end" of segregation. If only that were true... |
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