Thoughts from the first 58 pages of Kozol's "Shame of the Nation"

Jonathan Kozol is certainly the most widely known voice of education reform and you probably can't earn a graduate degree in an education-related field without being assigned one of his many books on the subject. Like a lot of my books for AP English, I managed to slip through without actually completing any of them. On a visit to the Bay area, I picked up a borrowed copy of "The Shame of the Nation" and started it last night.

In a sentence, it's about the return of America's public schooling system to an insidiously rationalized Separate But Equal model in which the country's minorities (in "Shame" this refers almost exclusively to African-American students) are clustered in opportunity-isolated schools housed in dilapidated buildings while the white students enjoy rich programs in newer (or at least safer) buildings and the country continues in ignorance and denial to write eloquently about Dr. King's dream. So far, my favorite irony from this book is the advice given him that "if you want to see a really segregated school in the United States today, start by looking for a school that's named for Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks." He then goes on to speak about one particular school in Seattle, Thurgood Marshall Elementary.

(Note: I volunteered briefly at a John Marshall high school in Seattle which provided a structured, individualized learning environment for students who had been expelled from other Seattle Public schools. Attending John Marshall HS was often a condition for students returning to otherwise "mainstream" public schools after having previously been expelled from a Seattle Public School. Check out their profile here.)

My first reaction is that this isn't an educational problem in our public schools, it's a cultural problem being reflected in our public schools. We don't have to convince these victimized students that they deserve not only better learning experiences through more thoroughly trained teachers, varied programs including the arts and exercise, and better facilities but the social experience of a genuinely diverse student body. It's the white families that are driving the segregation. In the 50's, this was activated through official policy and local legislation. Now it's driven by private and local property tax funding, the motivation of higher income white families and their non-working parents with grant writing experience and contacts, and the responsiveness of small governing bodies to this loud, white, minority asking for and getting the extras that distinguish the two Separate But Equal systems. These white families are not going to change their hard working, anything-for-my-child ways because this is America! In America, I deserve whatever I demand, especially if I can pay for it.

This is closely related to the Conceit of America which is a big monster of a topic I don't want to wake up just now - but the courts mandated in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education and yet the conditions are no different today - most of the schools Kozol has mentioned numbers for so far are over 90% non-white, often closer to 95% or 99.7%. Under the intense social pressures of the Civil Rights Movement, enforcement of desegregation was remarkably high for a time and schools changed. But the forces driving the split of opportunity aren't policy-related - their part of the American culture.

Can a court decision and Cognressional bill change that?