The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
by Sandra Stotsky

Court-ordered busing to integrate Boston’s public schools began in 1974. At the time, the schools enrolled about 94,000 students. As white and black middle class parents fled the public schools or continued their migration to the suburbs, the public school population shrank to less than 60,000. Simultaneously, busing costs rose, reaching $20 million or more annually.1 In his epilogue to the 1985 edition of Death at an Early Age, the book that catapulted Jonathan Kozol to national prominence in 1967, Kozol denounced the city’s schools for their continuing failure to educate its children: “The Boston School Committee, since expanded and reconstituted, now includes two highly vocal and politically sophisticated blacks. They supervise a system that, despite the greatest efforts of some excellent educators, has continued to turn out successive generations of the unskilled,unemployable, and undefended” (p.237).

With such an indictment, one might expect Kozol to have set forth a careful critique of busing to achieve integration in one of the many books he has written since 1967. One might especially expect some ideas on how to turn around a system of publiceducation with such dismal results for low-income children despite regularly increasing federal funding for precisely this population since passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. Yet, one looks in vain to find a focused or coherent discussion of this central question in any of the books Kozol has written. Indeed, the thrust of most of his books is that our schools are hopeless and our whole system of public education a hoax, perpetrated by a moneyed elite who send their children to the Phillips Academies in Exeter and Andover.
In The Night Is Dark and I am Far From Home (1975), Kozol argued that American schools are a consumer fraud, offering indoctrination rather than education. The chief function of the school reform literature is “to make the prison cells more pleasant—and the bars less visible.”

Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the CubanSchools (1978) continues this metaphorical image. Kozol has nothing but superlatives for Martinez Villena, a technical high school for 1200 non-university bound boys and girls, and he glowingly describes the Lenin School in Havana, a high school for the university-bound, commenting that “I did not at any time while I was in this school experience that sense of anguish, as of reliving a bad dream, that hits me almost every time I walk into the hallways and begin to breathe the smell of chalk dust and dead air of almost any secondary school in the United States” (p. 187).

His indictment of public education was scathing in On Being a Teacher (1981), an effort to inspire teachers to mobilize for a revolution inside the schools. An “archaic and dehumanizing
1institution,” he describes it. While “students reside within this house of lies for only twelve years at a stretch,” “their teachers often are condemned to a life sentence” (p.3).

Not only was public education a disgrace, so, too, was the extent of adult illiteracy in this country—over one-third of the population, according to Prisoners of Silence: Breaking the Bonds of Adult Illiteracy in the United States (1980) and Illiterate America (1985). Charging that this situation was not an unwanted one, and that the United States could not serve as a model for any nation on any issue until it addressed all its own problems successfully (a utopian criterion that effectively eliminates any possibility for national redemption), Kozol proposed a war on illiteracy cast as a war against injustice, to be led by those in the illiterates’ communities —“bootstrap mobilization”—with literacy programs relevant to their lives. We see here the influence of his friendship with Paulo Freire, one of the most influential educators of the 20th century despite the absence of studies attesting to the educational effectiveness of his ideas.2

Interestingly, in Kozol’s Afterword to Illiterate America, he offered useful ruminations on various issues in public education, such as his suggestion that “schools of education ought to be progressively drawn back, if not absorbed entirely, into schools of liberal arts,” with “scarcely more than one-semester periods of on-site preparation in the classroom” (p. 215). But Kozol did not go beyond rhetoric and anecdote here or elsewhere to develop his ideas in a way that might guide policy makers in furthering genuine reform.

By the time he wrote Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991), Kozol had drastically altered the object of his condemnation. It was no longer all public schools, just those attended by poor children. Public education might still be an “archaic and dehumanizing institution,” but defaming the totality of public education would no longer suit the story that he now wanted to tell—“the lifelong deformation of poor children by their own society and government” (p. 191). In this book, Kozol took up the banner against the often blighted urban schools they were concentrated in—schools with lower teachers’ salaries and higher teacher turnover rates than surrounding suburban schools.
Kozol followed up Savage Inequalities with Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (1995), a book featuring stories that attested to the resilience of children in these urban schools despite their frequently appalling physical and educational conditions and despite the medical and social problems of the neighborhoods in which they live—a result, he charged, of this society’s social policies. In Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope (2000), he decided to alter the bleak and depressing portrait of urban education in earlier books. Perhaps under pressure from his editors or fans, Kozol talked about a few decent schools in the South Bronx for poor children. However, readers learn nothing about how these children fared academically, or what their teachers did in their classrooms to boost their achievement, and one begins to sense that the programs and conditions that foster the academic growth of low-income children are of much less interest to him than whipping his countrymen’s consciences.

This impression solidifies after a reading of Kozol’s latest book, which is based on his visits to 60 schools in 11 states since 2000. A return to the strident and incessant moralizing of his earlier works, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (2005) beats the drum for three major public policies: massive (but voluntary) cross-district busing, to be stimulated by financial incentives to “white” suburban school districts, universal pre-school for needy children, and smaller classes for them—the kind of things money can buy. No strings are attached to any of these policies—Kozol is opposed to accountability. His chief target is what he calls the resegregation of the public schools, a term designed to obliterate the differences between de jure segregation in the South before the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of 2
Education in 1954 and the demographic realities of the public school population in our major cities. His evocation of former South African educational policies in the book’s subtitle is yet another attempt to arouse the energies of a younger generation of “revolutionaries.”

Whether the three policies he urges while recounting his talks with children, parents, and others would in fact improve black achievement, or how they best could, is never discussed. Nor does Kozol accompany his advocacy of costly educational programs with empirical data on their costs and a clear-eyed analysis of the complexities of these programs. His typically narrative mode of reportage conveniently does not facilitate these kinds of analysis.

A reasonable case can be made in theory for pre-school for low-income children, for smaller class size for them in the primary grades, and for more voluntary programs like Boston’s METCO that send them to suburban schools.3 But anyone seriously proposing mandatory pre-school for poor children as a way to forestall later academic difficulties would explore the long-standing and still unresolved controversy over the curriculum of pre-school programs, the problems in upgrading the quality of their current teachers and in recruiting enough well-trained teachers, and the reasons for the lack of long-term academic benefits from these programs for poor children. Anyone seriously proposing smaller classes would not fail to note that they make a difference only in the primary grades and with experienced teachers (hence the failure of California’s experiment in reduced class size) and would comment on such complexities as where well-trained teachers can come from.
Finally, anyone today seriously proposing massive busing programs to increase the academic achievement of black and Hispanic youngsters would explain why they mostly failed to do so; discuss the self-selection factor in programs like METCO; examine the growing insistence by black and white urban parents on neighborhood schools and not simply dismiss the phenomenon as politically and racially motivated; and justify the amount of money spent on busing instead of on teachers’ salaries or something clearly related to educational achievement. That Kozol does none of this suggests that his argument for massive cross-district busing for purposes of integration is little more than an attempt to re-establish moral high ground when there is nothing to salvage from the failed ideas of educational justice-seekers.

Kozol is still back in that Boston classroom in 1964, energized by the Civil Rights movement and outraged by the inadequacies of his students’ education. But, despite his urging, in the Afterword to Illiterate America, of a “realistic synthesis of needed skills and humane applications” (p. 211), as well as a more recent expression of interest in having all students read works connected to “our literary or moral heritage,”4 Kozol cannot move out of the dead-end he created for himself. He hitched his philosophical and pedagogical wagon to the wrong educational stars decades ago.
For example, he lauds Deborah Meier’s educational ideas throughout his book, acknowledging in an endnote his visits during 2002 and 2003 to the Mission Hill School in Boston, a small pilot school she organized and ran for about six years, with just the mix of students he wants. Yet, we read no stories from its classrooms. Perhaps he found out that student scores on the only external measure of accountability required of the school have been abysmal, in mathematics especially?5 Not surprisingly, Meier is as shrill in her denunciation of state assessments and No Child Left Behind as Kozol is, implying in her own recent book that low student scores might be attributable to a state testing system that was “antithetical to everything Mission Hill represented in terms of both curriculum and pedagogy” (p. 38).6

Why did he not visit some inner-city Catholic schools and reflect on why black and Hispanic students (who comprise just about all their students today) do much better than their peers in inner-city public schools, despite manifestly poorer resources and teachers with lower salaries?7 Why did he not visit the KIPP school in the South Bronx and ponder over the success of its 3 almost all-black student body with a traditional curriculum.8

Perhaps because these schools do not subscribe to a “progressive” pedagogy and, instead, try to give their students access to the “majority culture” through their curricula and the classroom and school norms they establish—something Kozol claims he supports and thinks integration would achieve.
And culture does matter. Shaker Heights, Ohio is an upper middle class school system with a student body that is half black and half white and still showing striking racial differences in academic achievement after several decades. The system has established after-school tutoring centers, an extra half hour of daily instruction for kindergartners scoring poorly on reading readiness, after-school study circles to expand black participation in Advanced Placement courses, and summer enrichment programs for black students.9 While progress has been made, black students’ SAT scores are on average 246 points lower than those of white students. It is not irrelevant that 60% of the black students in Shaker Heights come from single parent homes, compared to 10% of the white students, and that black students, nationally, watch twice as much TV as white students. Surely these (and other) cultural factors deserve discussion. But not a word from Kozol about the cultural factors that contribute to the “gap” or stories about schools like those in Shaker Heights.
Kozol has acquired hundreds of thousands of fans over the years, as evidenced by the sales of his books. It is not clear what influence he has had on public policy, but it is likely that he has influenced teachers—negatively. According to a study of course syllabi in a variety of education schools in the early 2000s, Savage Inequalities is one of the two most frequently assigned books.10 Kozol’s writings may well have helped to encourage several generations of urban teachers to spend more class time denouncing social injustice than teaching academic subject matter and helping to give their students access to the majority culture.

Ironically, The Shame of the Nation may well succeed Savage Inequalities as required reading in education schools in part because Kozol has chosen to wade into the reading “wars” in it, supporting “balanced literacy,” the evidence-lite reading pedagogy, also known as “whole language,” that has dominated teacher education and most public schools for decades. Although the average level of reading achievement for both white and black students in this country has been stalled during these same decades and leaves much to be desired, as the results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress regularly indicate, Kozol dismisses the reading pedagogy that is supported by a large body of credible research as a “rote and drill, stimulus-response curriculum.”11

Jonathan Kozol is a very confused thinker. He spent over half of his professional life denigrating public education, yet wants to integrate poor children within its framework. He sees public schools as houses of lies, yet wants to give poor children access to the majority culture in them. If he believes that the majority culture is worth acquiring, why doesn’t he tell teachers what to aim for? Kozol went to the Newton Public Schools and Harvard College, the best education that money could buy. Given his academic background, why can’t he see that the major impediment to black achievement today is the barely concealed assumption by schools of education and leading “progressive” educators that black students are incapable of learning the same curriculum that Asian and white students learn—and that he learned—and that black students need to be kept busy with a self-chosen, haphazard curriculum that de-emphasizes teaching, skills, and academic achievement?

1 Matthew Richer, Boston’s busing massacre. Policy Review, 1998, 92.
4
2 For a critical evaluation of Freire-inspired programs in the United States and Puerto Rico, see

3 The METCO program is a voluntary integration program funded by the Massachusetts legislature that enables children from a racially imbalanced urban school district to attend another school district. In its 36-year history, over 5000 students have graduated from suburban Boston METCO districts.

4 In an interview published in the September, 1998 edition of the Council Chronicle, a newsletter of the National Council of Teachers of English, Kozol decries the absence in inner city schools of “genuine literature” by such authors as Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, John Donne, and Walt Whitman. One wonders if he ever inquired of NCTE officials if they recommend these authors to English teachers in urban schools.

5 For example, according to Massachusetts Department of Education statistics, in 2002, 6 of the school’s 13 sixth graders failed; in 2005 (a year after Meier left the school), 9 of its 17 sixth graders failed (www.doe.mass.edu). For the school’s scores in all subjects on all state assessments in recent years, readers can consult the school profile that Great Schools, Inc. has made available on the Internet.

6 Deborah Meier, In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.

7 According to a 2005 report by the National Council on Education Statistics on student achievement in private schools, using NAEP data from 2000 to 2005, “Hispanic students in Catholic schools scored higher on average than public school students in every subject and grade where the sample size was sufficient to produce a reliable estimate. Black students in Catholic schools had higher average scores than Black students in public schools in all subjects and grades, except in grade 4 mathematics and grade 4 writing, where the apparent differences were not statistically significant” (p. 12).

8 Educational Policy Institute, Focus on results: an academic impact analysis of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). A research paper prepared for the KIPP Foundation, August 2005.

9 Michael Winerip. How One Suburb’s Black Students Gain. New York Times, On Education, December 14, 2005.

10 David Steiner, with Susan Rozen, Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers: An Analysis of Syllabi from a Sample of America’s Schools of Education. In F. Hess, A. Rotherham, & K. Walsh. (Eds.), A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom? Appraising Old Answers and New Ideas. Harvard Education Press, 2004, pp. 119-148.

11 Jonathan Kozol, Segregated Schools: Shame of The City. Gotham Gazette, January 16, 2006.