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.
Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “A Hardening of Lines”
In Chapter 6, Kozol describes “a new emboldenment” as “relatively privileged” parents actively separate their children “from more than token numbers of the children of minorities” (135).
First, he details how many of the best public schools have “admissions policies that clearly favor children of ‘savvy parents’” (135). For example, some applications need to be filed up to a year in advance, long before “less knowledgable parents” would think to sign their children up. Parents also might have to write about their “educational philosophy” and commit to providing “certain forms of educational support” (136). Furthermore, children often have to take tests or interviews for admission, and “educated parents” help their children prepare with coaching or expensive preparation programs.
As a result of these complicated processes, author Katha Pollitt describes how these public schools become “disproportionately white enclaves.” Despite this inequality, she argues that if parents want their children to get a good education, they have no choice but “to pocket [their] qualms” (137).
These “selective elementary schools” funnel children into equally selective high schools. One such school is Stuyvesant High School, an institution filled with “extraordinary students” who “win numerous awards and honors” and are “rewarded […] with academic opportunities” (139). However, the school’s racial demographics are “a source of great embarrassment” (140). In a city where 72% of the students are Black and Hispanic, less than 6% of Stuyvesant’s student body fits this demographic. These skewed numbers create “uneasiness,” but many believe that Stuyvesant’s students “genuinely deserve to be there” and other students aren’t accepted because they couldn’t “handle the demands” (140). Merit, Kozol writes, “is somehow self-confirming” (140); when “a plateau of high achievement has been reached” (140), it is easy to forget the advantages and opportunities that led to that success.
Most of the children Kozol knows in the Bronx have never heard of schools like Stuyvesant or even good schools in their neighborhood, like the Bronx High School of Science. Instead, they generally enter a “large and low-performing high school” where “all their prior years of educational denial are not easily reversed” (142). Like the elementary schools Kozol has described, these high schools are often housed in overcrowded, dilapidated buildings. Many of the teachers are “provisional,” and violence isn’t uncommon. One smaller “academy” was housed on the fifth floor of a “bleak and grimy” building in East Harlem. Asthmatic children often had to pull out their inhalers while climbing to class. During his visit, Kozol describes some children as “wired-up and angry” (144). He saw a fight erupt at this school and others in the Bronx.
Talking to students about their plans after graduation in a Bronx high school called Walton High, several students answered Kozol “sarcastically” or “with crude obscenities.” One boy finally admitted that the topic was “upsetting” to him. He told Kozol, “I don’t have the least idea of where my life is heading, and these questions that you’re asking make me scared” (147). Out of 1,275 ninth graders enrolled at Walton in 1999, only 188 graduated their senior year. These children “grew up and went to school in the United States but had never had more than a fraction of a chance to find their way into good schools” (150).
Next, Kozol describes visiting schools in Roosevelt, a segregated suburb on Long Island. The district encompasses one and a half square miles, and its demographics are 85% Black and 15% Hispanic. Although the district has “extremely high” property taxes, commercial taxes all but disappeared when businesses and white residents “fled […] as African Americans arrived in hopes of living a suburban life within a mixed community” (151). As a result, the district is the lowest-spending in the county, spending almost $12,800 per student in the 2001-2002 school year, while neighboring districts spent as much as $20,000 per student.
The district was in “critical condition.” The first elementary school Kozol visited used the Success For All curriculum in an 80-year-old building with “unresolved asbestos problems” (152). The school had not yet received its materials, even though the year was well underway, so the children spent their time “mastering the silent signals” that the curriculum employed (153). In the second elementary school, portions of the building had been condemned and were cordoned off with “Restricted Area” and “Danger” signs. The principal called the school “the worst place you could ever put a child” (154).
The high school building was in better condition, but the atmosphere “was suffused with a disturbing sense of lethargy and aimlessness” (155). The principal led Kozol to a sewing class, where seventh and eighth graders were making pillows. In a school where only 10 out of 220 eighth graders passed their state English exam, the class “struck [Kozol] as anachronistic” (157). He describes leaving the school, remembering the “look of tortured dignity in the eyes” of the teachers there as they tried “to cope with the calamity that has been handed them” (157).
A year before Kozol visited Roosevelt, the State Commissioner of Education attempted to dissolve the district and redistribute the students to surrounding districts. Kozol describes this as “an opportunity to end the educational apartheid of a small community of children” (159). Roosevelt was home to a small number of students who could easily be absorbed into the better nearby schools. However, the surrounding districts responded with “sheer terror,” and flyers warned parents that Roosevelt students would bring “rampant violence,” “drug sales,” and “wide-spread pregnancies” to their schools (158). The plan was abandoned, and instead, the state implemented “the instruments of strict accountability that we have seen in other districts” (159).
Chapter 7 Summary: “Excluding Beauty”
Chapter 7 focuses on the often atrocious state of the degrading facilities in low-income public schools.
Kozol begins the chapter by describing an assignment he gave his fourth-grade students in Boston in the late 1960s. Kozol had inherited the class following a string of 12 substitute teachers, and the children had “limited writing skills.” He asked them to describe what they saw in their schools every day. Instead of critiquing their spelling and grammar, he wanted the children to emphasize “vividness of details” when they described what they did and did not like about their school. The papers were full of descriptions of “browken windows,” cracked walls, and dirty rooms. As one child wrote, “My school is so so dirty” (162). Kozol notes that conditions have improved in many schools, but many children still face a daily “insult to aesthetics” as they attend school in dirty, “morbid-looking buildings” (163). Although many aspects of children’s school lives are measured, Kozol points out that “there is no misery index” (163); no one measures the happiness of school children or examines their enjoyment of school.
Kozol continues the chapter by describing a visit to an overcrowded elementary school in Oklahoma City. Like many of the other schools Kozol visits, the place was full of “likable children and hard-working teachers” trying to make the best of their limited resources (164). The school was built for 400 students, but more than 750 were enrolled, meaning many attended classes in trailers described by the principal as “barracks classrooms.” Lunch was served in six shifts to accommodate the extra students, and children had to venture outside to a separate trailer to use the bathroom. Despite these challenges, Kozol notes that the school “had a much softer and more child-friendly feeling” than others he had visited (165). In a kindergarten class, for example, Kozol describes children “sitting on a colored rug” with their “playful” and “good-natured” teacher, reading stories and singing songs (166).
Meanwhile, at the segregated Russel Elementary School in Lexington, Kentucky, Kozol discovered a class of second- and third-graders “being taught a lesson about corporate achievement and the workings of the private market by a representative of IBM” (167), drilling vocabulary like “income,” “goods,” and “scarcity.” Built in 1953, the school was in desperate disrepair, with “gaping holes” in the walls and a condemned basement. However, even this school “had not lost that fragile sense of unprotected and unglazed humanity in grown-ups and endearing randomness in children” (169).
In California, Kozol describes a “harsher reality.” California’s public schools were subject to “legendary” overcrowding; many students attended classes in “unsafe classrooms” or “temporary trailers,” and almost 1,000 schools operated on a year-round schedule to accommodate the surplus of students. Teachers were under intense pressure “to conform to very rigid state curricular requirements” (169). In San Bernardino, Kozol visited Monterey Elementary School, which was under state review due to low test scores. The school operated year-round in “staggered shifts.” Most students were children of color, and only three out of 800 did not qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Talking to Kozol, the school’s superintendent explained that parents could see the conditions at Monterey compared with more affluent neighboring schools, causing them to wonder: “Why are our children not important?” (171).
In 2001 and 2002, a group, including the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a legal action that took this question of worth to the state of California. With reports and testimonies from students, teachers, and school employees from 18 public schools across the state, attorneys presented the California Supreme Court with evidence “reminiscent of conditions in the schools of southern districts as they were described in cases tried by Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston and their colleagues in the years preceding Brown” (171). They described classes without books, computers, or lab equipment, overcrowded classrooms without enough seating for students, and classrooms where the temperature rose dangerously high during the summer. For Kozol, “some of the most disturbing documentation” described rodent infestations in elementary schools.
Many schools also documented other “health hazards,” such as exposed asbestos and lead-based paint. Kozol gives the example of 75th Street Elementary School in South Central Los Angeles, housed in a building that looked like “a prison” and where officials warned parents to test their children for possible lead poisoning. With a student body of 99.7% Black and Hispanic, 75th Street Elementary also operated on a year-round schedule in which half the students moved from one grade to the next without a summer break. Teacher turnover was high, and the school adopted the Success For All curriculum with standards posters lining the walls of kindergarten classrooms instead of children’s drawings.
Next, Kozol describes his visit to Fremont High School in Los Angeles, which is housed on a campus that the Los Angeles Times described as a “neighborhood fortress.” At Fremont, 3,300 of the school’s 5,000 students are in class at all times. The school’s average ninth grader “reads at fourth or fifth-grade level,” and around two-thirds drop out before 12th grade (175). Many classes took place in portable trailers, and some “windowless and nasty” storage closets had been converted into classrooms. All 3,300 students ate lunch during the same 30-minute period, but some spent the entire time walking to the cafeteria and waiting in line, leaving them no time to eat. Adding to the list of “indignities” that students face, Fremont High had a limited number of bathrooms; the available ones often had long lines and “lack[ed] basic supplies” (177). A student named Mireya told Kozol that students were only allowed to use the bathroom between classes, but in the “huge building,” students often had to rush straight from one class to the next. Then, teachers often denied students’ requests to use the bathroom during class, saying they missed their chance between periods.
One of Mireya’s classmates described how students were “shortchanged in academic terms” (181). Even those with academic aspirations were still forced into required “Technical Arts” classes. At more affluent schools, these might be classes in architecture or journalism, but at Fremont, the students were offered sewing and hairdressing classes. Mireya hoped to go to college and broke down in tears when she told Kozol about the sewing class she had to take. Her mother was a seamstress in a factory, and she wanted something better. A boy spoke up to tell Mireya that she was “ghetto,” so she would be sent “to the factory” like her mother.
Students at Fremont are also drained by long school days due to the year-round schedule. Some stay at school until 9 pm and leave “totally glassed-over.” Furthermore, students had limited access to the library, which was often closed or used for testing or meetings, making it difficult for students to study and do research.
On his way back to Massachusetts, Kozol read papers by Fremont students describing the situation at their school. He was “saddened” by the papers. Most of the high school students wrote at a fourth- or fifth-grade level, and their writing failed to convey “the lucidity of thinking many demonstrated in [their] conversation” (184). Kozol argues that low-income children of color are “placed in very much the same positions in which black kids have been forced to play for well over 100 years” (185). Their childhoods are spent in schools with “inferior equipment” and “inadequate and overburdened supervision” (185), and students are “channeled all too frequently into […] low-level work-related programs of instruction” instead of encouraged to pursue academic goals (185). The sewing and hairdressing classes offered at schools like Fremont are part of “a caste-determined practice” that has taken place in segregated schools for decades.
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
In Chapter 6, Kozol argues that public schools have become increasingly segregated in part because “privileged parents” actively “carve out almost entirely separate provinces of education for their children” (135). Admission barriers to high-quality schools effectively exclude almost all children of color, and parents with more resources actively seek out segregated education for their children. Furthermore, when schools have the opportunity to integrate, such as the Roosevelt district that Kozol details at the end of the chapter, parents of wealthier districts fight against accepting children of color, citing worries about “rampant violence,” “drug sales,” and wide-spread pregnancies” (158).
Kozol’s account further elucidates The Moral and Ethical Dimensions of Equitable Education, in this case by showing the detrimental impact of a lack of educational equality. Specifically, Kozol outlines how the implicitly racist and explicitly racist dimensions of educational segregation. First, Kozol suggests that the intersection of class and race—whereby the history of systemic racism in the US entails that many people of color also belong to lower socioeconomic classes—produces an implicitly racist pattern in which privileged and affluent parents—who are predominantly white—use their resources to access higher-quality schools. When this fails, such as when a district proposes more school integration, explicitly racist norms emerge, with parents employing racist stereotypes about people of color (e.g., that they are violent, use drugs, etc.) as a basis for keeping schools segregated.
Kozol notes that these are just some of the ways that implicit bias keeps children of color isolated in underperforming schools. Pressed on the issue, white parents agree that public education is often unfair, but they “pocket [their] qualms” and hide behind the belief that their children are inherently better or more worthy. One of the key justifications that Kozol points out is the “self-confirming” nature of merit. Kozol discusses the “extraordinary students” who attend New York City’s elite high schools; teachers, parents, and the students themselves believe they deserve to be there because of their academic achievements, which are undeniably impressive. However, this point of view ignores the years of advantages they had because of their race and social class are often ignored. The same thing happens with children of color in poor schools. Kozol describes “the pyramid of numbers for enrollment by grade levels” at many urban schools as numbers dwindle when students near graduation (150). However, the “catastrophic dropout rates” are generally not seen as a consequence of the chaotic education these children have access to but as a lack of dedication, work ethic, and intelligence. Hence, where proponents of the status quo ascribe these disparities to the shortcomings of the children themselves, Kozol presents these phenomena instead as evidence of The Impact of Segregated Education on Children and Communities.
Kozol’s repeated descriptions of the decrepit conditions in urban schools further underscore the absence of value placed on poor children of color. In Chapter 7, Kozol describes in great detail the discomfort and “indignities” that these children are forced to endure, including attending rat-infested schools that lack fundamental resources like adequate bathrooms. Descriptions like these reveal how the environment of urban schools is often completely unconducive to learning, meaning that inner-city children have to work even harder than their suburban counterparts to overcome these obstacles.
Finally, these two chapters contain an important analysis of the “caste-determined practice” of funneling low-income students of color into menial labor jobs. At high schools like Rosevelt and Fremont, students are actively denied academic classes and forced to enroll in courses like sewing and hairdressing. Kozol argues that this practice of funneling children of color into “low-level work-related programs of instruction” that limit “their future economic options” has been affecting Black children for more than 100 years (185). In schools like Rosevelt, with “serious academic problems” (157), requiring a sewing class implies that the students are a lost cause academically. However, this also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as students who do have the academic merit to attend college are barred from the resources they would need to make their dreams come true. They cannot, for example, access the library to study and must suffer through long school days that leave them “totally glassed-over.” Students like Mireya are aware of these inequalities and are slowly worn down by them. Hence, Kozol continues to make the case that any purported evidence that these educational inequalities are justified are themselves products of the very educational inequalities that defenders of the status quo wish to keep in place.
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