Shame of the Nation

 

Jonathon Kozol, National Book Award winning author of Savage Inequalities, once again visits the topic of inequity in America's public schools. Focusing this time on totalitarian teaching methods in urban districts and near apartheid levels of segregation, Kozol examines the growing divide between the haves and have-nots of our public schools and the waning hopes that the levels of desegregation and opportunity once envisioned in former times will one day be achieved.

One shameful and tragic irony that surfaces immediately in Kozol's work, is that to find some of the most segregated and unequal schools, one need only to look for those named after the leaders who fought so hard to against such conditions; leaders such as Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Fannie Lou Hamer. In states such as Michigan, New York, Illinois, and California, once "bastions of progressive thinking" and homes for politically charged social movements, can now be found these same schools where rates of segregation are the highest in the nation.

The disrepair, unequal funding, and lack of basic resources in many of the schools from Savage Inequalities are still present, while new military style instructional methods and prisonesque management techniques have begun to emerge under the name of "urban education." In some instances, a form of classroom eduspeak has been imposed upon the natural language of children reminiscent of Orwell's 1984. And in this new era of No Child Left Behind accountability measures, subjects that are not directly tested on standardized exams have either been marginalized or dismissed entirely in these urban schools.

Thirteen years have passed since Savage Inequalities, yet Kozol's passionate voice continues to speak out loudly for those children whose voices are rarely heard. It continues to remind a nation of shameful truths that have been long been ignored. The true shame of the nation, as Kozol points out, is that "No matter how complex the reasons that have brought us to the point at which we stand, we have, it seems, been traveling a long way to a place of ultimate surrender that does not look very different from the place where some of us began."