Reprinted from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/books/review/25glazer.html?pagewanted=1New York Times Book Reviewby Nathan Glazer
Jonathan Kozol has been writing books rather similar to this one since "Death at an Early Age" in 1968. He is persistent, it is true, but so is the problem that has aroused his passions since he began teaching in a Boston school more than 40 years ago, when he was a young civil rights activist. That problem is the conditions under which we educate the children of the poor and minorities. In his account, they are trapped, almost uniformly, in old schools that are overcrowded, in poor repair, with scanty teaching materials and disgraceful toilets, and staffed by generally underqualified teachers.
In the five years up to the writing of "The Shame of the Nation," Kozol visited approximately 60 schools, in 30 school districts, in 11 states. Some of these schools are in the South Bronx, and he became familiar with their principals, their teachers and many of their students. (He dedicates the book to a teacher in one such school.)
But along with his familiar theme of the inadequacy of the education we provide the children of the poor and minorities, he has a new focus in this book - the return of a substantial degree of segregation in our urban schools. Black and Hispanic students, he writes, are concentrated in schools where they make up almost the entire student body. (I should say that I once opposed the use of the word "segregation" to cover both the state-imposed separation of the races in the South and the concentration of minority students in schools outside the South, which arises for a number of reasons, but that is a lost cause - today we use "segregation" for both.)
The chief academic authority on this issue, whom Kozol interviews and quotes, is Gary Orfield of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has been as persistent in documenting the scale of segregation, and attacking its presumed educational effects, as Kozol has been in describing it. According to Orfield and his colleagues, writing in 2004, and quoted by Kozol, "American public schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous resegregation. . . . During the 1990's, the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased . . . to a level lower than in any year since 1968."
Because Kozol's forte is the detailed description of the school, the classroom, the work of the teacher and its effect on the student, we do not get from him any large discussion of why this resegregation has occurred. It's true court-ordered desegregation programs have been abandoned in many cities, as judges have been persuaded either that they are having no useful effects in closing the educational gap between blacks and others, or that they have become futile, since the number of white students in many school districts, particularly in large cities, has declined to insignificance. A further problem with these plans is that the number of minority groups to be considered for redistribution has been rising with immigration, and some oppose the breakup of their communities for purposes of desegregation. (In San Francisco, school districts making assignments had to keep in mind nine specified groups.)
Is this abandonment of court-ordered programs the chief or most significant cause of increasing resegregation? Or is it rather that residential segregation has increased (though it should be noted that the research generally shows small decreases over time)? Or that white resistance has grown? Or that black demands for integration have weakened? Or is it some other factor altogether? One cannot expect and will not get the answers to such questions from Kozol.
Nor is there much analysis of whether greater integration would make any difference educationally. Quoting The New York Times, Kozol notes that parent groups are asking school officials in New York City to exclude from their local schools "thousands of poor black and Hispanic students who travel long distances." The parents want more room for their own children so that they can attend schools in their own neighborhoods. Desegregation efforts, The Times notes, "produced lackluster academic results," and the schools "lost their distinct neighborhood character." One would think it would be important to consider whether the results were indeed lackluster, and whether retaining the neighborhood character of schools is a value. But for Kozol the overriding issue is integration. It is, after all, the promise of the 1954 Brown decision, and the difficulties - one might say the impossibility, in many large cities - of implementing desegregation do not moderate his insistence that we must place black children in schools with more whites. He does not go into great detail as to how this might now be done. Orfield and Kozol do point out that more is possible in small cities.
Neither does Kozol spend much time on the question of whether desegregation would have the positive educational effects he hopes for. In fact, it would be difficult for him to do so because he is skeptical about the tests we depend on to determine just what the educational effects of various interventions are. These tests, of reading and mathematics, are required by school districts, states and now, because of the No Child Left Behind law, the federal government, and they take up an increasing part of the school day. Reading and mathematics are both the easiest and least controversial subjects to test, and also, for most educators, parents and public officials, the most important skills for children to attain.
Kozol argues - as many educators do - that the increasing emphasis on testing, with the resultant pressures on children, teachers and principals, and the drastic effects that failure in these tests can have for a school and its staff (there is a reason they are called "high-stakes" tests) have badly thinned out education in schools for the poor and minorities. He offers good evidence of this. By devoting more and more time to test preparation, schools are neglecting other subjects - history and social science, geography, music and art - that are not part of the "high-stakes" tests. Kozol wants education to be richer than simple competence in reading and mathematics, and he would consider it a narrowing of the aims of education to use these test results to argue for the educational benefits of integration. (By the same token, he would not be deterred from his support of integration if no positive effects could be shown.)
His attack on the disparity in expenditure on education between central cities and well-to-do suburbs is similar. There has been research using the standard tests that questions whether greater expenditures on schools and students produce better educational results, but that research does not discourage Kozol. He expresses outrage at inequities in expenditure, pointing out that New York City in 2002-3 spent $11,627 on the education of each child, while Manhasset spent $22,311, Great Neck $19,705 and so on. There are comparable disparities in other metropolitan areas. (I have often been amused by these per-student expenditure figures, and have performed the thought experiment of calculating how much would be available at these levels of expenditure for the education of, say, a class of 20 children. It comes to some $220,000 for New York City, and one would think that would be more than enough to pay the teacher well, buy books and materials, maintain the classroom and even pay the janitor. One wonders where the money goes. The question is even more provocative when one considers the $440,000 available for a class in Manhasset.)
Expenditure per student in New York City has risen by two-thirds since 1991, when Kozol dealt with this issue in his book "Savage Inequalities," an increase considerably more than inflation, with no obvious educational effects. One can argue that regardless of specific measurable educational effects, the poor deserve whatever benefits - in class size, better-paid teachers, more supplies, larger playgrounds, cleaner restrooms - that an increase to the Manhasset level would make possible. But the litigation in many states now attacking these disparities, litigation reviewed by Kozol, is based not on the argument that the children in the big cities deserve to have as much spent on them as is spent in well-to-do suburbs, but on a different proposition - namely, that the expenditures of the big cities do not provide an "adequate" education, as prescribed in the state constitutions. "Adequacy," one assumes, will in time be judged by the same kind of tests we are using today.
In New York State the litigation has now resulted in a judicial requirement that school expenditure in New York City be increased by something like 40 percent. Clearly such an increase would make life pleasanter for teachers and students. There is no strong evidence it would do much for the test results. One suspects the "adequacy" argument will eventually wind up in the same black hole that now accommodates arguments for desegregation.
To be sure, the case for both integration and equality of expenditure is powerful. But the chief obstacle to achieving these goals does not seem to be the indifference of whites and the nonpoor to the education of nonwhites and the poor, although this is what one would conclude from Kozol's account. Rather, other values, which are not simply shields for racism, stand in the way: the value of the neighborhood school; the value of local control of education and, above all, the value of freedom from state imposition when it affects matters so personal as the future of one's children.
States could probably see to it that local school districts received uniform sums for the education of each child (with perhaps a supplement for those from difficult circumstances), but how could politicians prevent well-to-do or knowledgeable parents from adding more on their own, or from leaving the state system entirely? It is factors like these - which add up to nothing less than a commitment to individual freedom - that make it so difficult to achieve the obviously desirable goals of integration and equalization.
It's pretty ironic that in the same edition of the Times that this subtle oh-so-liberal hatchet job on Kozol's book appears, there is a story about the Raleigh school system that indeed validates Kozol's thesis that school integration does matter a lot:
As Test Scores Jump, Raleigh Credits Integration by Income
http://nytimes.com/2005/09/25/education/25raleigh.html?hp&ex=1127707200&en=778ea407a23e91fd&ei=5094&partner=homepage
The depressing reason "separate but equal" can not work in the United States is found in the second part of the title of Kozol's book, which Glazer fails to mention: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Segregation is the racist's favorite tool, and as long as black and hispanic children are locked away in segregated schools, those schools will be disgraceful ruins in every sense.
All we have to do is look at the comparitive fates of blacks and whites in New Orleans in the past weeks. This is not rocket science, and it's not like the Supreme Court didn't get it 90 years ago. Why are 'social scientists' like Glazer still talking rings around this?
Whites can't be trusted to even try to deliver equity in schools unless their kids go to them too. Period.
This could have been written by a South Boston 'townie' in the 1970's when they violently fought against black kids coming to their schools:
"Rather, other values, which are not simply shields for racism, stand in the way: the value of the neighborhood school; the value of local control of education and, above all, the value of freedom from state imposition when it affects matters so personal as the future of one's children."
You can call it anything you want, but Lord forbid you should call it racism.
"States could probably see to it that local school districts received uniform sums for the education of each child (with perhaps a supplement for those from difficult circumstances), but how could politicians prevent well-to-do or knowledgeable parents from adding more on their own, or from leaving the state system entirely? It is factors like these - which add up to nothing less than a commitment to individual freedom - that make it so difficult to achieve the obviously desirable goals of integration and equalization."
And what's with this fatuous crap? As if the idea of individual freedom conflicts with the idea of justice. It has been Kozol's assertion since 1968 that as a matter of simple justice, black kids deserve more and better than whites way beyond "perhaps a supplement." And this is what drives Glazer-types crazy about him or any other white who breathes a word about reparations and compensation for centuries of svage inequality. Kozol has spent almost 40 years putting the actuality of oppressed children right up in the faces of his Harvard peers. I'm sure they can't stand him.
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