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

“One of the consequences of their isolation, as the pastor has observed, is that they have little knowledge of the ordinary reference points that are familiar to most children in the world that Pineapple described as ‘over there.’ In talking with adolescents, for example, who were doing relatively well in school and said they hoped to go to college, I have sometimes mentioned colleges such as Columbia, Manhattanville, Cornell, or New York University, and found that references like these were virtually unknown to them.”

Kozol describes how complete Black children’s isolation is in the Bronx. Even if they might have academic aspirations or dream of college, they do not know their options. Universities like Columbia and Cornell are well-known to most New Yorkers and even most of white society outside of New York City, so they should be common reference points for New York children preparing for college.

“It is notable in this respect that, in all the many writings and proposals dedicated to the alteration of self-image among inner-city youth and the reversal of debilitating pressures from their peers, the suggestion is virtually never made that one of the most direct ways to reduce the damage done to children by peer pressure is to change the make-up of their peers by letting them go to schools where all their classmates are not black and brown and poor, and children and grandchildren of the poor, but where a healthy confidence that one can learn is rooted in the natural assumptions of Americans who haven’t been laid waste by history.”

Kozol discusses the need to counteract inner-city children’s “self-doubt,” observing how some schools employ various motivational chants at the start of the school day. However, Kozol argues that the students’ self-confidence would be most improved by integrating schools, thereby eliminating the source of feelings of inferiority.

“In a nation in which fairness was respected, children of the poorest and least educated mothers would receive the most extensive and most costly preschool preparation, not the least and cheapest, because children in these families need it so much more than those whose educated parents can deliver the same benefits of early learning to them in their homes.”

Here, Kozol discusses the inequalities in accessing preschool education. Many low-income children do not have access to preschool, while wealthy, educated parents pay large sums to make sure their two- and three-year-olds have an educational head start. The children of educated parents can presumably acquire many of their early learning skills at home, while their poorer counterparts may not. Therefore, these low-income children ought to have expanded access to preschool, not reduced access.

“In their children’s teenage years they sometimes send them off to boarding schools like Andover or Exeter or Groton, where tuition, boarding, and additional expenses rise to more than $ 30,000. Often a family has two teenage children in these schools at the same time; so they may be spending over $ 60,000 on their children’s education every year. Yet here I am one night, a guest within their home, and dinner has been served and we are having coffee now; and this entirely likable, and generally sensible, and beautifully refined and thoughtful person looks me in the eyes and asks me whether you can really buy your way to better education for the children of the poor.”

This is one example Kozol offers of the ethical side-stepping that many affluent parents often engage in. To overlook educational inequalities and their own relative privilege, they imply that poor children would not benefit from the more expensive education their own children receive. This further implies the racist belief that poor children of color are inherently inferior.

“Unable to foresee a time when black and Hispanic students in large numbers will not go to segregated public schools and seeing little likelihood that schools like these will ever have the infrastructure and resources of successful white suburban schools, many have been dedicating vast amounts of time and effort to create an architecture of adaptive strategies that promise incremental gains within the limits inequality allows.”

Throughout The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Kozol illustrates how school districts have essentially given up on integration. A sense of resignation permeates many of the so-called solutions that various policies propose to improve failing urban schools. These “adaptive strategies” imply that children of color will never have equal educational opportunities nor that the same strategies that work in more affluent suburban schools can be applied to urban ones.

“If we did not have a segregated system in which more experienced instructors teach the children of the privileged and the least experienced are sent to teach the children of minorities, these practices would not be needed and could not be so convincingly defended. They are confections of apartheid and, no matter by what arguments of urgency or practicality they have been justified, they cannot fail to further deepen the divisions of society.”

In this passage, Kozol discusses the rationale for using scripted standards-based curricula in urban schools. Many advocates claim that these curricula are necessary to “teacher-proof” materials and compensate for inexperienced instructors and high turnover. However, Kozol argues that these are symptoms of the segregated schooling system. If children were not separated by race and socio-economic status, these measures would not be necessary. Instead of addressing the root of the problem, these scripted curricula serve to further separate Black and white students.

“‘Primitive utilitarianism’—‘Taylorism in the classroom’—were two of the terms that Mr. Endicott had used in speaking of the teaching methods in effect within his school. ‘Commodification’—‘of the separate pieces of the learning process, of the children in themselves’—is the expression that another teacher uses to describe these practices. Children, in this frame of reference, are regarded as investments, assets, or productive units—or else, failing that, as pint-sized human deficits who threaten our competitive capacities. The package of skills they learn, or do not learn, is called ‘the product’ of the school. Sometimes the educated child is referred to as ‘the product’ too.”

Here, Kozol begins to introduce the marketplace-driven aspect of urban education. He describes how there is a fundamental difference between how white children and children of color are discussed. For the latter, references to “products” and “commodification” dehumanize these children and imply they don’t need or deserve the same educational approaches as white children.

“But, even so, most of us are inclined to ask, there must be something more to life as it is lived by six-year-olds or ten-year-olds, or by teenagers for that matter, than concerns about ‘successful global competition.’ Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.”

Kozol repeatedly argues that urban schools strip the joy from children’s childhoods. In the name of efficiency and utilitarianism, they forget the inherent, universal value of childhood. This further exemplifies the dehumanizing effect of market-driven rhetoric in urban schools.

“Shorn of unattractive language about ‘robots’ who will be producing taxes and not burglarizing homes, the general idea 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 has been accepted widely. And much of the rhetoric of ‘rigor’ and ‘high standards’ that we hear so frequently, no matter how egalitarian in spirit it may sound to some, is fatally belied by practices that vulgarize the intellects of children and take from their education far too many of the opportunities for cultural and critical reflectiveness without which citizens become receptacles for other people’s ideologies and ways of looking at the world but lack the independent spirits to create their own.”

Whereas white children in suburban schools are seen as individuals and given the tools to develop their sense of self and point of view, children of color are treated as a homogenized group. Officials and educators groom these children to enter low-paying menial lines of work by ensuring they don’t develop the intellectual skills that students in more affluent school districts are encouraged to pursue.

“In many of these schools, traditional subjects such as history, geography, and science are no longer taught because they are not tested by high-stakes examinations and cannot contribute to the scores by which a school’s performance will be praised or faulted. Anyone who talks informally with children in some of these elementary schools is likely to discover quickly the effects that this has had in limiting their capability for ordinary cultural discernments.”

In this passage, Kozol describes the consequences of standardized testing in urban schools. In some schools, the pressure to improve test scores is so intense that traditional subjects not appearing on these tests are removed from the curriculum to allow more time to prepare students for standardized tests. The students’ lack of “capability for ordinary cultural discernments” illustrates how standardized tests are not a true measure of students’ learning. Although test scores might go up, the students have failed to learn other important things.

“The virtual exclusion of aesthetics from the daily lives of children in these schools is seldom mentioned when officials boast that they have pumped the scores on standardized exams by three or four percentage points by drilling children for as many as five hours in a day. The scores go up, the scores go down, as new officials and new methods come and go, as Mrs. Meier notes; but the stripping away of cultural integrity and texture from the intellectual experience of children, denial of delight in what is beautiful and stimulating for its own sake and not for its acquisitional equivalents, is a perennial calamity.”

Again, Kozol illustrates how there is more to education and childhood than test scores. Test scores may go up, but children often receive a diluted “intellectual experience” as a result. Furthermore, the scores often rise at the cost of finding joy in learning and discovery.

“Merit, no matter how it may have been attained, is somehow self-confirming. The early advantages one may have had become irrelevant to most of us once a plateau of high achievement has been reached. The years we may have spent when we were three and four years old in a superb developmental preschool, the strategies our parents may have used to win us entrance to a first-rate elementary school, and all the other preferential opportunities that may have introduced us to the channels in which academic competence has been attained—all this falls out of view once we arrive in a position in which we can demonstrate to others, and ourselves, that our proficiencies are indisputably superior to those of other students of our age who may not have had these opportunities.”

This is another example of how sectors of mainstream society justify the segregation of public schools. By the time students are admitted to exceptional high schools, they are often undeniably extraordinary students who deserve to be there. However, they have also likely had many advantages along their educational path, starting well before elementary school. If poor children of color had access to these same opportunities, high-quality schools would likely have much more diverse student bodies.

“Mireya later spoke insightfully of academic problems at the school, but her observations on the physical and personal embarrassments she and her schoolmates had to undergo cuts to the heart of questions of essential dignity or the denial of such dignity that kids in squalid schools like this one have to deal with.”

In this passage, Kozol describes a conversation with a student in California’s decrepit Fremont High School. He describes the issues that she and her classmates face, like limited access to bathrooms, as indignities that no individual should have to face. This frames the inadequacies of urban schools as human rights issues.

“I was saddened to read these papers after talking with the students for so long, because their writing skills would give no hint of the lucidity of thinking many demonstrated in our conversation.”

After leaving Fremont High, Kozol reads several papers written by the students he spoke with. The quality of the writing versus the quality of the students’ spoken ideas illustrates the disservice their education has done to them. While they are capable of complex ideas, their educational journey has not given them the tools to articulate these ideas in writing.

“In the first pages of this book, I spoke of the sewing class for black fifth graders (females only) in the school in which I taught in 1964 and 1965 in Boston. We have also seen the sewing class for seventh and eighth grade students (males and females both) at Roosevelt Junior High School. Courses in hair-dressing (“cosmetology”) have also been offered to black females in our nation’s segregated schools for decades, starting as long ago as in the 1950s, if not earlier, a caste-determined practice that was rarely questioned by repeated generations of administrators in these systems. Now Hispanic students also, mostly female, are encouraged or required to take classes such as these, as we have seen at Fremont High, while children of the white and middle class are likely to be learning algebra and calculus and chemistry and government and history and all those other subjects that enable them to set their sights on universities and colleges.”

Here, Kozol describes how students of color have historically been funneled into low-paying, menial jobs. He argues that this practice is continuing in many urban schools. Instead of the academic classes they would need to prepare for college, many Black and Hispanic students have no choice but to take classes in trades like sewing or hairdressing.

“In a similar dynamic, certain highly gifted or, in any case, initially impressive urban principals are periodically elected to assume the same role as an incarnation of the possibilities for hope within a context of historic failure which we are encouraged to believe is not systemic but the fault primarily of the ineptitude or lassitude of previous administrators.”

In this passage, Kozol describes how new principals or administrators are often expected to completely transform failing schools. However, this ignores the systemic problem the schools suffer from. Without changing the system, these charismatic new officials are also destined to fail.

“No matter what the social obstacles that children, both minority and white, must learn to overcome, no matter what the necessary games that must be played and roles that must be filled in adolescent years (the emphasis on style differences, and music tastes, and all the rest of what may seem to separate them at the start), a strange phenomenon—normality, humanity—kicks in; and, not in every case, but far more often than a social order with our racial history has reason to expect, they do reach out across the structural divide time and again and we are better, as a nation, for the consequence.”

Although there is often some fear and uncertainty at first, Kozol argues that the results of integration are overwhelmingly positive. When individuals of different races know one another as children, many of the perceived differences fall away, strengthening society as a whole.

“Even more troubling in some respects, attorneys in most of the states where cases are now pending have been forced, as a result of legal precedents and in order to subdue political resistance on the part of wealthy districts, to renounce the goal of fully equal education and to ask the courts to give poor children not the same high level of resources offered by the wealthiest white districts but merely ‘sufficient’ funding to achieve the standards now demanded of them by the state.”

Kozol describes how attorneys are no longer even fighting for “separate but equal” education. Rather, they argue that poor districts should have “sufficient” or “adequate” funding. This again reflects the level of resignation that permeates education advocacy. Kozol observes that such a gulf separates wealthy districts from poorer ones that it seems impossible to close.

“As a result of the federal precedents that we have seen, as well as the combustible political realities in some of the most stridently divided metropolitan communities, lawyers for the plaintiffs rarely choose to speak at all of racial isolation. Indeed, the argument in almost all these cases rests implicitly upon the premise that the Warren Court was incorrect in its decision and that separate education can be rendered, if not equal, at least good enough to be sufficient for the children who attend school in a segregated system.”

Here, Kozol illustrates how far the fight for education equality has strayed from the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education. In the Brown decision, the court ruled that segregated education damaged Black children by “[generating] a feeling of inferiority” that could cause permanent damage (29). However, none of the cases arguing for equal education opportunities mention the damaging effects of racial isolation or make any effort to renew attempts at desegregation.

“As things stand today, the children in the schools we have examined in this book are not protected by their nation. Yet they are expected in school to perform at national standards, are graded on what are, in fact, no less than national exams that measure their success or failure according to nationally determined norms, are expected to vote someday in national elections, compete for earnings in a national job market and, because of their race and poverty, are far more likely than most other citizens to imperil their lives by serving in our nation’s wars. The illegitimacy of the uneven social contract by which they are bound invites a more aggressive scrutiny than it can be accorded in the courts of separate states.”

Kozol argues that children of color are being treated unfairly across the country. They are held to national standards and expected to contribute to society but are not supported or given the resources they need to succeed. He argues that this problem is of national concern and should not be left to the states.

“Nonetheless, and even to this day, the argument is sometimes heard that ‘middle-class education’ (or ‘white education,’ as it’s sometimes said by very conservative and ethnocentric urban educators) is essentially devoid of structure, lacking in substance, and bereft of serious intentionality, and that schooling more in line with military practices and ‘road-to-Rome’ predictability now represents a necessary antidote for inner-city children who, it is argued, have too little discipline and order in their neighborhoods and homes.”

Here, Kozol describes one of the common misconceptions used to justify different pedagogical approaches for distinct groups of students. This assumption that inner-city children need strictly structured curricula to counteract their supposedly chaotic lives is based on a relatively small progressive education movement that doesn’t reflect the reality in many suburban schools.

“If the differentness of children of minorities is seen as so extreme as to require an entire inventory of ‘appropriate’ approaches built around the proclamation of their absolute uniqueness from the other children of this nation, it begins to seem not only sensible but maybe even ethically acceptable to isolate them as completely as we can, either in the segregated schools they now attend or else in wholly separate tracks within those schools in which some mix of economic class and race may now and then prevail.”

Kozol explains that the more we treat children of color differently, the more separated they become from mainstream society. If they are taught using drastically different methods from their white suburban counterparts, it begins to seem like they need these methods to learn and so must be kept separated.

“Beneath the radar of efficiency technicians and the stern disciples of instructional approaches based on strict Skinnerian controls, one still may find humane and happy elementary schools, both large and small, within poor neighborhoods in which affectionate and confident and morally committed teachers do not view themselves as the floor managers for industry whose job it is to pump some ‘added value’ into undervalued children but who come into this very special world of miniature joys and miniature griefs out of their fascination and delight with growing children and are thoroughly convinced that each and every one of them has an inherent value to begin with.”

As he closes the text, Kozol points out that there are still examples of inner-city schools that treat their pupils like children instead of like products. They value their students as individuals and find joy in supporting the universal experience of childhood.