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The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America | 
 enlarge | Author: Jonathan Kozol
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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You Save: $8.85 (59%)
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Rating:  53 reviews
Sales Rank: 858
Media: Paperback
Pages: 432
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 1
ISBN: 1400052459
Dewey Decimal Number: 379.2630973
EAN: 9781400052455
ASIN: 1400052459
Publication Date: August 1, 2006
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Product Description
Over the last 15 years, the state of inner-city public schools has been in a steep and continuing decline. Since the federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, segregation of black children has reverted to its highest level since 1968. In many inner-city schools, a stick-and-carrot method of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons is now used with students. Meanwhile, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions, liberal education has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society.
Filled with the passionate voices of children, principals, and teachers, and some of the most revered leaders in the black community, The Shame of the Nation pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems by the Bush administration. In their place, Kozol offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some 50 years ago to all our youngest citizens.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 48 more reviews...
Our schools are now more segregated than ever September 18, 2005
Robin Orlowski (United States)
88 out of 100 found this review helpful
Jonathan Kozol uses his background in public education and keen wit to deliver another scathing, needed, and largely accurate critique of American public schooling.
In the sequel to his 'Savage Inequalities', he argues that patterns of socioeconomic stratification paired with standardized testing fever are creating and maintaining disparate education systems which are recreating segregated schooling.
Mostly white children in 'nice' suburbs have clean and safe schools with a curriculum that stimulates their interests and creativity. Meanwhile, predominantly black and Hispanic children are consigned to attend run-down inner city schools whose administrators and staff (even the 'good and caring' ones) must spend the scant money they do receive on rote memorization.
Socioeconomic discrepancy will subsequently be used to track those students into an altogether different set of life opportunities.
In addition to economics, Kozol heaps blame at the rise of standardized testing programs. Instituted with the then-idealistic idea they would help schools, teachers, and parents proactively diagnose "learning problems" so all students could then achieve, these programs have instead become a tool in creating and reinforcing the disparities.
Students unable to pass the testing program become branded as 'failure' subsequently limiting their academic and other future options---all on the results of one piece of paper. Examining the current high-stakes test-centric enviroment, it is difficult to believe that this public policy originated as a program intended to help all children.
'Whose children are being helped in America's schools with our current policies?' should be asked
All school districts are vulnerable to 'teaching to the program' but such actions hurt already short-changed inner city students much more than the suburbanite. Because the former school has money to spare outside of the testing programs, compliance with federal and state testing program requirements (no matter how unrealistic the benchmark definitions of student success) is easier to absorb. The same school struggling to keep working toilets is not as fortunate.
Brilliant observations aside, Kozol did not factor in how disability affects education. I had attended a 'rich' school district, but had my own experiences with tracking and unequal resources because I was a special education student who was enrolled in a resource math class. Because I am also aware these experiences are severely amplified in urban school districts and current standardized testing programs attempt to ignore or downplay the need to provide disability accommodations for eligible students, this information should have been included in his study.
 Class, Race and Willful ignorance September 28, 2005
N. Richardson (Los Angeles, California United States)
82 out of 95 found this review helpful
It is noted that those who make the choice to attack the book on the basis of their own ideological biases, seem to have serious problems with honesty (they didn't actually read the book) or exhibit for all the world to see that they are unable to grasp a fairly simple thesis: that segregation in our public schools damages children.
Jonathan Kozol has spent the last forty something years observing on a first hand basis the tragedy of how our educational system has failed those who might most benefit from going to clean, well-equipped schools, where every child has a desk, a chair and materials....as well as a decently trained professional educator dedicated to imparting knowledge to them.
It is one thing to blame the poor for their conditions, it is quite another to consign small children to rotten schools on the basis of their luck in not being born into the right race or class. It would seem the only compassion worthy of the conservatives who write reviews for books they can't be bothered to read is feeling sorry for a failed scheme like No Child Left Behind. That, and gratuious attacks on teachers unions. Talk radio propaganda< however, is not a good foundation for book criticism.
Kozol, a man of extraordinary decency and insight into the inequities of our educational system, doesn't base his theories on statistics and thinktank framing. He goes into the schools he writes about, and talks to the kids who are consigned to them, the teachers who have to make do with impossible conditions, and parents fighting for their kids.
Kozol just reports what he sees, and writes movingly and gracefully about those who will pay the price of the criminal neglect our society seems to think is acceptable. The stories he tells are heartbreaking. And that there is no escaping the shame that those attack this book, clearly without reading it, would feel if they weren't so firmly invested in escaping the accountability and responsibility, which the last time I checked were supposed to be Conservative Values.
 Just like the last 15 books September 29, 2005
A. Reviewer (KC, MO)
45 out of 114 found this review helpful
I've been a high school and college teacher for 15 years, and it's disheartening to know that Kozol is still at his old tricks. Virtuous lies don't help anyone; they simply enrage people when they learn that the agitiprop is 30+ years out of date.
It would be nice if Kozol didn't reject every solution that anyone else poses. He's had one solution in mind since the 1960s: money. Choice? Charter schools? European or Asian models? Religious schools? Who cares?
It would also be nice if Kozol were to examine the role of: parents, students, and communities. Kozol sees racism underneath every rock, and that allows him to have heroes and villians, but life is more complicated than that.
I recommend instead: "Breaking Free," by Sol Stern (a Democrat who reluctantly but emphatically came to believe in school choice) and this article:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110007329
I also recommend "IN THE CLASSROOM : Dispatches from an Inner-City School that Works," by Mark Gerson. This book changed my life.
*** Here's a question: other than reading specious books, what are the readers actually doing in the real world to help kids?
Nobody wants to see or hear this September 27, 2005
Avid Reader
39 out of 42 found this review helpful
A compelling look at the disparity in our educational system. In some parts of this country there is a disparity in annual expenditure per pupil WITHIN THE SAME CITY of $9,000. Nearly every city has an unacceptable disparity. The poor in this nation stay poor because they are denied an equal chance to better themselves - starting at age 5.
The money spent on the bogus No Child Left Behind could and should instead be spent to level the playing field for all students.
Ignoring poverty and blaming the poor is all too popular in America these days, but how can a child escape the cycle of poverty if they don't have the same access to education?
I don't believe that anyone could actually have read this book and still believe that the poor in America are poor because they don't try as hard as the rest of us. The better-off keep these people down by refusing to educate them.
No Child Left Behind is a sham. I know: I work for a software company that makes the tests, scores them, and supports the teachers and administrators who administer these tests. It is simple window dressing by the current administration. I have yet to meet a teacher, administrator or parent who believes NCLB accomplishes a thing for the students. The teachers already KNOW which kids are underperforming. Race and poverty are the biggest predictors of NCLB test scores. Duh! The money being spent to show what is already known could be spent to improve the worst public schools. We waste money measuring students to find out what we already know, instead of spending money to improve their education.
 Not the whole story January 2, 2006
inner city teacher (California)
34 out of 52 found this review helpful
While Kozol does a good job tugging at heartstrings, he does not tell the whole story. I teach at one of the schools profiled in his book and what he is not saying is that there is almost no parent involvement, some parents actually aid and abet their children ditching school and many students do not want to put in the work neccessary to succeed. There is an anti-intellecual environment with many students. A few realize that education is the key to their success and work their tails off but most don't. It has nothing to do with the level of teaching. I have found that students failing my class are generally failing most other classes as well. We have many excellent teachers. What Kozol fails to talk about is personal responsibility on the part of parents and students....No one is forcing students to tag up the hallways and trash their school...there are too many teachers with a "rescue complex" who refuse to provide a high level of work for their students, then when they take a class where much is expected of them, they balk....
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