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

Chapter 4 delves into other ways in which instruction often differs between poor inner-city schools and their more affluent suburban counterparts. Kozol begins by describing a school in Columbus, Ohio, that paired its stimulus-response curriculum with a “surprisingly explicit training of young children for the modern marketplace” (89). As early as kindergarten, children were asked what job they wanted and were steered toward the curious choice of “manager.” As the grades progressed, the children were given various classroom responsibilities, all with a managerial title, such as “Coat Room Manager” or “Door Manager.” Help-wanted signs were posted in hallways to recruit children for class management positions. To “apply” for these “jobs,” students had to fill out applications complete with references.

When Kozol asked the principal about the recurring managerial theme, the principal told him they wanted to teach children that “companies will give you opportunities […] to prove yourself no matter what you’ve done” (93). Pressed on this last point, the principal explained that she wanted the children to know they could become managers “even if [they] had a felony arrest” (93). Kozol still wasn’t sure why “manager” was the only job option presented, but the principal had run out of time for questions.

Kozol describes “something truly radical” in how “inner-city children are perceived” (93). He argues that curricula such as this stimulus-response model suggest the “commodification” of education. This means that children of color are understood primarily in terms of their future capacity for productivity. Students are viewed as “investments, assets, or productive units—or else, failing that, as pint-sized human deficits who threaten our competitive capacities” (94). However, Kozol argues that “childhood is not merely basic training for adulthood” (95); it is “a perishable piece of life itself” and should have some inherent value (95).

Nevertheless, “utilitarian ideas” have come to dominate education pedagogy for low-income children. Beginning in the 1980s, inner-city children have often been regarded as “faulty products,” and companies have invested in curricula that “embody corporate ideas of management and productivity” (95). In “market-driven classrooms,” many schools now use “business jargon,” compelling children to “negotiate” rather than share, for example. Students are often “incentivized” to work for “earnings,” something that may seem like an innocent reward system but is seldom replicated in suburban schools full of white children. Kozol argues that “the mercantile distortion of […] education” is taken to “extremes” and defended “unabashedly” (97). When one principal was criticized for using rote instruction to turn his students into “robots,” he responded that those “robots [would] never burglarize your home” or “snatch your pocketbook” (97).

To Kozol, this suggests the widespread belief that “schools in ghettoized communities must settle for a different set of goals than schools that serve the children of the middle class and upper middle class” (98). Inner-city students are educated with “practices that vulgarize the intellects of children” and remove “opportunities for cultural and critical reflectiveness,” creating individuals that “lack the independent spirits to create their own” worldview (98).

Kozol argues that the connection “between education and employment” is most apparent in the names of these inner-city schools (98). Many so-called “school-to-work” schools have names like “Academy of Enterprise” or “Corporate Academy.” Advocates for these programs argue that “children of all backgrounds” should have “some work experience” (99). While in suburban schools, the idea of work experience is more of a “decoration” to the curriculum, in many low-income, urban schools it is “the energizing instrument of almost every aspect of instruction” (99). In some cases, Kozol concedes that school-to-work programs could be “realistic and humane”—perhaps for teenagers who clearly have no further academic future—but this emphasis on the workplace often begins as early as elementary school. It is “a prior legislation of diminished options for a class of children who are not perceived as having the potential of most other citizens” (100).

Kozol offers another example of the limited choices provided to children in urban schools, with an example of a job training program in Chicago. Students were required to choose a “career path” as freshmen that dictated their high school education. There was a “career path” for a college education, but one teacher claimed that this option “wasn’t marketed to many of the students” (102). Many didn’t even know that going to college was possible for them.

While some schools “do try to embody the progressive concept of combining practical experience with genuinely intellectual instruction” (104), many of these programs are advocated for directly by corporations and business leaders who have never spoken out against segregation in schools. In fact, Kozol points out that a major supporter of the early school-to-work programs was Charles Murray, the author of The Bell Curve, which argued that genetic differences between races resulted in differences in intellectual ability. Murray argued that children from “disorganized homes” in “urban areas” needed to go to school to prepare for the workplace, whereas other children could receive “a more expansive kind of education” (105). In many urban schools, teachers and principals are often told explicitly that their students should be “team players,” a quality that Kozol calls “of great importance” to corporations and military settings. However, he argues that “a healthy nation” also needs “future poets, prophets, ribald satirists, and maddening iconoclasts” (106). Many of the teachers and principals that Kozol encounters speak “almost nostalgically” about educational principles, like critical thinking, which they feel obliged to “set aside in order to respond to the realities before them in the neighborhoods they serve” (108).

Chapter 5 delves into standardized testing, the method of “product-testing […] these juvenile commodities” (109). While Kozol admits that high-stakes testing is “damaging” for all children, he claims that “the effects are still more harmful” in poorly performing urban schools with limited resources (110). On the one hand, in schools with generally good test scores, teachers tend to be more relaxed, and “the tests do not entirely suffocate instruction or distort the temperaments and personalities of the instructors” (110). However, in failing schools that must progress on their “improvement plans,” all instruction might be geared toward the all-important standardized exams, and teachers face extreme pressure for their students to score well. Any classroom activity that doesn’t correspond to the exam is considered a waste of valuable time. From the point of view of the “‘manager’ of language arts” for the Chicago public school system, the standardized exam is Rome, and “if the road does not lead to Rome […] we don’t want it followed” (110-11).

Kozol describes how many students in low-income districts work exclusively from test prep booklets instead of proper textbooks, and much time that schools could use for learning is sacrificed in the name of test prep. In some schools, children have as many as five hours of test preparation on certain days, and some have to attend special preparation classes on Saturdays. Some children are told that the test is “the only thing that is important” (113), giving them extreme anxiety about passing. In some cities, standardized exams are given as early as kindergarten, when some children cannot even read the test or hold a pencil.

Testing students from a very young age is known as “front-loading children,” ensuring they do well on later exams by introducing testing as early as possible. Advocates generally claim that these tests help teachers see their students’ weaknesses, but the scores are often not returned until months later when the student has already moved on to another class and teacher.

Kozol points out that there are tests that teachers can administer as a “genuine assessment” of students who are having difficulties. These are generally low-stress because they are not results-oriented but meant to generate helpful information. Standardized tests, however, often lead teachers to doubt their instincts and observations about their students; the only important data becomes their test scores. Quoting Deborah Meier, Kozol argues that these exams can cause educators to “distort the education that [they] offer” to prioritize the alleged improvement of higher numbers. However, this practice has many consequences, such as forcing children to repeat grades based on their test scores, decreasing a student’s likelihood of graduation.

Furthermore, many “traditional subjects” have been abandoned completely in urban schools because they are not tested on standardized exams. Many students no longer have classes in subjects like history and geography, which “limit[s] their capability for ordinary cultural discernments” (118). Kozol recounts a conversation with fifth- and sixth-grade students from PS 65 who couldn’t tell Kozol what country they lived in. Art and music likewise become “marginal activities” when they exist at all, and schools often eliminate recess to make time for more test preparation. Kozol calls this loss of “cultural integrity and texture from the intellectual experience of children” a “perennial calamity” (119). Schools even take away summer holidays from some students who need to improve their exam scores or skew the school year so students return with more time to prepare for state exams.

No matter how negative the consequences of these standardized exams might be, Kozol describes them as “sharpened swords above the heads of principals and teachers” (122). The officials of schools that score the lowest are publicly humiliated, while those of schools that score the highest are often entitled to cash bonuses. However, in many cases, Kozol points out that teachers whose students don’t score well “are penalized collectively for long-existing problems over which they did not have control,” such as students who have faced “long periods in which there was no continuity in their instruction” (123). Additionally, failed schools are often closed, and their students are sent to other schools, whose scores go down, again at no fault to the teacher.

In many schools that are beholden to standardized test scores, classes are based completely on specific learning objectives, and teachers “cannot afford” to indulge in any deviation from these objectives. There are “no detours for the interesting little storyteller who is piling on the ‘ands’ and ‘buts’ to tell us something which, to him at least, is of the greatest possible importance” (125).

Kozol describes the various ways that children rebel against these strict testing policies. He describes one boy named Anthony, who was a 12-year-old student in the South Bronx. Anthony “read very widely” for a 12-year-old and liked to write poetry. Although he “tended to overreach his reading skills at times” (126), with authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens, Kozol describes Anthony’s reading comprehension as “usually pretty good.” Adults he had conversations with found him to be “a precocious boy with an endearing eccentricity” (127). However, Anthony’s test scores were terrible. By the time he reached high school, “his intellectual originality and curiosity […] created problems for him at the school” (128), and he frequently ended up in detention. Anthony received a stroke of luck, however, and a reverend that Kozol knew arranged for the boy to interview with a New England boarding school. He was admitted despite his poor test scores and went on to graduate high school and pursue a graduate degree. Kozol concludes, therefore, that numbers, “do not tell us all we need to know about our children” (130-31).

Kozol closes the chapter by drawing on a lecture by the former state commissioner of education in New York, Thomas Sobol. Although he participated in the early stages of the “standards movement” in the 1980s and 90s, Sobol argued that “much of what is going on in the name of standards and accountability verges on the heretical” (131). He lamented the “stifling uniformity” of testing practices and claimed that “education involves the heart as well as the mind” (131). In the future, he argued, the “standards era” would appear “old-fashioned,” and we would “come to understand that we have been eating poisoned grain” (132).

Kozol presents two points of disagreement with Sobol. He argues that the standards movement was “loaded with a coarse utilitarian toxicity and a demeaning anti-human view of childhood right from the start,” and he further expresses doubt that “our political system would reject a set of policies” that made it impossible for many students to graduate high school (133). Rather, he points out that “millions of poor children” have been “sent into the streets without diplomas now for many generations” (133). However, he remarks that Sobol’s stance against standardized testing “seemed extraordinary” and thinks that Sobol and Anthony were “both dissenters.”