{"product_id":"the-shame-of-the-nation-isbn-9781400052455","title":"The Shame of the Nation","description":"Since the early 1980s, when 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFilled with the passionate voices of children, principals, and teachers, and some of the most revered leaders in the black community, \u003ci\u003eThe Shame of the Nation\u003c\/i\u003e pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems. 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.\u003cp\u003e“A call for activism, \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Shame of the Nation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e firmly grounds school-reform issues in the thorny context of race and concludes that the nation has failed to deliver the promise of Brown.” —\u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A vividly written account from the frontlines of ‘apartheid education.’ It is impossible not to share Kozol’s outrage.” —\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Segregation is back, and only a writer of Jonathan Kozol’s wisdom and passion can assess its terrible price, one child at a time. It isn’t easy, but before we can craft a solution, we have to feel the shame.” —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of \u003ci\u003eNickel and Dimed\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Shines a spotlight on poor, minority children, sabotaged and isolated by an educational system tilted to slight them . . . His outrage ought to infect us.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Shame of the Nation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e is a national wake-up call about what is happening to our children on our watch in schools across the country. It should be required reading.” \u003cbr\u003e–Marian Wright Edelman, CEO and Founder, Children’s Defense Fund\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A powerful, morally enraged polemic in which [Kozol] argues that we have failed to deliver the promise of \u003ci\u003eBrown v. Board of Education\u003c\/i\u003e…We know that more funding and more integration would help poor African-American children, and we are not doing anything about it. That is indeed shameful. It is inspiring that afer all these decades, Kozol is still angry about these inequalities, and eloquently so. His book will make you fighting mad, and it should.” –\u003ci\u003eNewsday \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Shame of the Nation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e urges national action, including major funding increases and access to preschool. It’s hard to imagine anyone better qualified than Kozol to press the case. Still, that Kozol has to tell the story of educational segregation and resegregation again and again, that he so often seems alone in doing so, and that so little progress is made—that is truly a shame of our nation.” –\u003ci\u003eColumbia Journalism Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Alive with the compelling voices of students and educators Kozol has come to know in countless visits to inner-city schools—voices many of us otherwise would not hear…His glimpses inside America’s second-class schools tell the story that numbers can’t.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Jonathan Kozol has been a voice in the wilderness for poor children in the United States. Now, in his most powerful book, he returns to the nation’s dirty little secret of resegregation of the public schools and the erosion of \u003ci\u003eBrown v. Board of Education\u003c\/i\u003e. He is our nation’s conscience on issues of race, poverty, and children.” –Theodore M. Shaw, director-counsel and President, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A real cry from the heart. Everybody who cares about children, about democracy, about citizenship, and about America’s future must read this book.” –Roger Wilkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor, George Mason University\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A gripping narrative of children’s lives within our nation’s rapidly resegregating schools…A prophetic work that sears our conscience for the high ideals of racial justice we have all too willingly betrayed.” –Rabbi David Saperstein, director, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Shame of the Nation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e reveals the disparity in our schools as dramatically as Hurricane Katrina revealed the disparity in our society.” –Howard Gardiner, Professor of Education and Cognition, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and author of \u003ci\u003eMultiple Intelligences\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This book will make your blood boil. I found myself reading whole pages aloud to anyone I could.” –\u003ci\u003eO, the Oprah Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Shame on all of us to let this happen to our children and praise to Jonathan Kozol for telling us yet again of our gross failure to provide for our children the education they deserve.” –John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke Professor of History Emeritus, Duke University\u003c\/p\u003eJonathan Kozol is the National Book Award–winning author of \u003ci\u003eDeath at an Early Age\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eRachel and Her Children\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSavage Inequalities\u003c\/i\u003e, and\u003ci\u003e Amazing Grace\u003c\/i\u003e. He has been working with children in inner-city schools for more than 40 years.CHAPTER 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Dishonoring the Dead\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One sunny day in April, I was sitting with my friend Pineapple at a   picnic table in St. Mary’s Park in the South Bronx. I had met Pineapple   six years earlier, in 1994, when I had visited her kindergarten class   at P.S. 65. She was a plump and bright-eyed child who had captured my   attention when I leaned over her desk and noticed that she wrote her   letters in reverse. I met her again a few weeks later at an afterschool   program based at St. Ann’s Church, which was close to P.S. 65, where   Pineapple and a number of her friends came for tutorial instruction and   for safety from the dangers of the neighborhood during the afternoons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The next time I visited her school, it was the spring of 1997. She was   in third grade now and she was having a bad year. The school was in a   state of chaos because there had been a massive turnover of teachers.   Of 50 members of the faculty in the preceding year, 28 had never taught   before; and half of them were fired or did not return the following   September. Very little teaching took place in Pineapple’s class during   the time that I was there. For some reason, children in her class and   other classes on her floor had to spend an awful lot of time in forming   lines outside the doorways of their rooms, then waiting as long as 30   minutes for their turn to file downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch,   then waiting in lines again to get their meals, then to go to recess,   then to  the bathroom, then return to class. Nearly two hours had elapsed   between the time Pineapple’s classmates formed their line to go to   lunch and finally returned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On another day when I was visiting, before the children were allowed to   have their lunch they were brought into an auditorium where old   cartoons like Felix the Cat and Donald Duck and other flickering movies   from the past were shown to keep them occupied before their class was   called to file down into the cafeteria. The film in the film projector,   which must have been very old, kept slipping from its frames. The   lights would go on and kids would start to hoot and scream. I sat   beside Pineapple and her classmates for three quarters of an hour while   a very angry woman with a megaphone stood on a stage and tried to get   the room under control by threatening the kids with dire punishments if   they did not sit in perfect silence while they waited for the next   cartoon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the following year, when she was in fourth grade, Pineapple had four   different teachers in a row. One of them was apparently a maladjusted   person who, Pineapple said, “used swear words” to subdue the children.   (“A-S-S-E-S!” Pineapple said politely, since she did not want to speak   the word itself.) One was fired for smoking in the building. Another   was “only a helper-teacher,” Pineapple reported, which, a member of the   faculty explained, might have been a reference to an unprepared young   teacher who was not yet certified. Pineapple, who had always been a   lively and resilient little girl, grew quite depressed that year.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When Pineapple used to talk to me about her school she rarely, if ever,   spoke in racial terms. Going to a school in which all of her classmates   were black or Hispanic must have seemed quite natural to her—“the way   things are,” perhaps the way that they had always been. Since she had   only the slightest knowledge of what schools were like outside her   neighborhood, there would have been no reason why she would remark upon   the fact that there were no white children in her class. This, at   least, is how I had interpreted her silence on the matter in the past.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So it surprised me, on that pleasant day in April as the two of us were   sitting in St. Mary’s Park, while Pineapple’s little sister, who is   named Briana, wandered off at a slight distance from us following a   squirrel that was running on the grass, when Pineapple asked me   something that no other child of her age in the South Bronx had ever   asked of me before. Leaning on her elbows on the picnic table, with a   sudden look of serious consideration in her eyes, she seemed to   hesitate a moment as if she was not quite sure whether the question in   her mind might somehow be a question you are not supposed to ask, then   plowed right on and asked it anyway.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What’s it like,” she asked me, peering through the strands of beaded   cornrows that came down over her eyes, “over there where you live?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Over where?” I asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Over—you know . . . ,” she said with another bit of awkwardness and   hesitation in her eyes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I asked her, “Do you mean in Massachusetts?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She looked at me with more determination and a bit impatiently, I   thought, but maybe also recognized that I was feeling slightly awkward   too.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You know . . . ,” she said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I don’t know,” I replied.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Over there—where other people are,” she finally said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Pineapple was usually very blunt and clear—she sometimes inadvertently   hurt other children’s feelings by her tendency to make unsparingly   direct remarks—so her use of that ambiguous and imprecise expression   “other people” didn’t seem like her at all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I asked her if she could explain which “other people” she was thinking   of. At that point a wall went up. “You know,” was all she said—“where   you live . . . where the other people are. . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I didn’t try to press her further about who she meant by “other people”   after that. I think she felt it would be rude to say “white people,”   which is what I was convinced she meant, and I have no memory of   whether, or how, I tried to answer her. She and I have since had many   talks in which she posed the racial question more explicitly. Pineapple   is a shrewd teenager now and she has seen a good deal of the world   beyond the Bronx and doesn’t feel she has to mince her words in talking   to a grown-up friend whom she has known now for so many years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That evening, however, I repeated what Pineapple said to Martha   Overall, the pastor of St. Ann’s, who pointed out to me how little   contact with white people, other than the principal and teachers at the   school and some of the grown-ups working at the church, most of these   children ever had. “They don’t have any friends who are white children.   When I take them with me sometimes to Manhattan to go shopping at a   store for something special that they want or to a movie maybe on one   of their birthdays, and they find themselves surrounded by a lot of   white kids, many of the younger ones get very scared. It’s an utterly   different world for them. In racial terms, they’re almost totally cut   off.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One of the consequences of their isolation, as the pastor has observed,   is that they have little knowledge of the ordinary reference points   that are familiar to most children in the world that Pineapple   described as “over there.” In talking with adolescents, for example,   who were doing relatively well in school and said they hoped to go to   college, I have sometimes mentioned colleges such as Columbia,   Manhattanville, Cornell, or New York University, and found that   references like these were virtually unknown to them. The state   university system of New York was generally beyond their recognition   too. The name of a community college in the Bronx might be familiar to   them—or, for the boys, perhaps a college that was known for its   athletic teams.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Now and then, in an effort to expand their reference points, the pastor   takes a group of children to an inter-racial gathering that may be   sponsored by one of the more progressive churches in New York or to a   similar gathering held in New England, for example. I have accompanied   the St. Ann’s children on a couple of these trips. The travel involved   is usually fun, and simply getting outside the neighborhood in which   they live is an adventure for most of the children in itself. But the   younger children tend to hold back from attempting to make friends with   the white children whom they meet, and many of the teenage kids behave   with a defensive edginess, even a hint of mockery, not of the white   kids themselves but of a situation that seems slightly artificial and   contrived to them and is also, as they surely recognize, a one-time   shot that will not change the lives they lead when they return to the   South Bronx.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It might be very different if these kids had known white children early   in their lives, not only on unusual\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    occasions but in all the ordinary ways that children come to know each   other when they go to school together and play games with one another   and share secrets with each other and grow bonded to each other by   those thousands of small pieces of perplexity and fantasy and sorrow   and frivolity of which a child’s daily life is actually made. I don’t   think that you change these things substantially by organizing staged   events like “Inter-racial Days.” Even the talks that certain of the   children are selected to deliver on these rare occasions often have a   rather wooden sound, like pieties that have been carefully rehearsed,   no matter how sincere the children are. Not that it’s not worth holding   such events. They energize politically the adults who are present and   sometimes, although frankly not too often, long-term friendships may be   made. But token days are not the ebb and flow of life. They ease our   feelings of regret about the way things have to be for the remainder of   the year. They do not really change the way things are.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Many Americans I meet who live far from our major cities and who have   no first-hand knowledge of realities in urban public schools seem to   have a rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of   racial isolation they recall as matters of grave national significance   some 35 or 40 years ago have gradually, but steadily, diminished in   more recent years. The truth, unhappily, is that the trend, for well   over a decade now, has been precisely the reverse. Schools that were   already deeply segregated 25 or 30 years ago, like most of the schools   I visit in the Bronx, are no less segregated now, while thousands of   other schools that had been integrated either voluntarily or by the   force of law have since been rapidly resegregating both in northern   districts and in broad expanses of the South.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “At the beginning of the twenty-first century,” according to Professor   Gary Orfield and his colleagues at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard   University, “American public schools are now 12 years into the process   of continuous resegregation. The desegregation of black students, which   increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has now   receded to levels not seen in three decades. . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    During the 1990s, the proportion of black students in majority white   schools has decreased . . . to a level lower than in any year since   1968. . . . Almost three fourths of black and Latino students attend   schools that are predominantly minority,” and more than two million,   including more than a quarter of black students in the Northeast and   Midwest, “attend schools which we call apartheid schools” in which 99   to 100 percent of students are nonwhite. The four most segregated   states for black students, according to the Civil Rights Project, are   New York, Michigan, Illinois, and California. In California and New   York, only one black student in seven goes to a predominantly white   school.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    During the past 25 years, the Harvard study notes, “there has been no   significant leadership towards the goal of creating a successfully   integrated society built on integrated schools and neighborhoods.” The   last constructive act by Congress was the 1972 enactment of a federal   program to provide financial aid to districts undertaking efforts at   desegregation, which, however, was “repealed by the Reagan   administration in 1981.” The Supreme Court “began limiting   desegregation in key ways in 1974”—and actively dismantling existing   integration programs in 1991.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Desegregation did not fail. In spite of a very brief period of serious   enforcement . . . , the desegregation era was a period in which   minority high school graduates increased sharply and the racial test   score gaps narrowed substantially until they began to widen again in   the 1990s. . . . In the two largest educational innovations of the past   two decades—standards-based reform and school choice—the issue of   racial segregation and its consequences has been ignored.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “To give up on integration, while aware of its benefits,” write Orfield   and his former Harvard colleague Susan Eaton, “requires us to   consciously and deliberately accept segregation, while aware of its   harms. . . . Segregation, rarely discussed, scarcely even acknowledged   by elected officials and school leaders”—an “exercise in denial,” they   observe, “reminiscent of the South” before the integration era—“is   incompatible with the healthy functioning of a multiracial generation.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Racial isolation and the concentrated poverty of children in a public   school go hand in hand, moreover, as the Harvard project notes. Only 15   percent of the intensely segregated white schools in the nation have   student populations in which more than half are poor enough to be   receiving free meals or reduced price meals. “By contrast, a staggering   86 percent of intensely segregated black and Latino schools” have   student enrollments in which more than half are poor by the same   standards. A segregated inner-city school is “almost six times as   likely” to be a school of concentrated poverty as is a school that has   an overwhelmingly white population.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “So deep is our resistance to acknowledging what is taking place,”   Professor Orfield notes, that when a district that has been   desegregated in preceding decades now abandons integrated education,   “the actual word ‘segregation’ hardly ever comes up. Proposals for   racially separate schools are usually promoted as new educational   improvement plans or efforts to increase parental involvement. . . . In   the new era of ‘separate but equal,’ segregation has somehow come to be   viewed as a type of school reform”—“something progressive and new,” he   writes—rather than as what it is: an unconceded throwback to the status quo of 1954. But no matter by what new name segregated education may be known, whether it be “neighborhood schools, community   schools, targeted schools, priority schools,” or whatever other   currently accepted term, “segregation is not new . . . and neither is   the idea of making separate schools equal. It is one of the oldest and   extensively tried ideas in U.S. educational history” and one, writes   Orfield, that has “never had a systematic effect in a century of   trials.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Perhaps most damaging to any effort to address this subject openly is   the refusal of most of the major arbiters of culture in our northern   cities to confront or even clearly name an obvious reality they would   have castigated with a passionate determination in another section of   the nation 50 years before and which, moreover, they still castigate   today in retrospective writings that assign it to a comfortably distant   and allegedly concluded era of the past. There is, indeed, a seemingly   agreed-upon convention in much of the media today not even to use an accurate descriptor such as “racial segregation” in a narrative description of a segregated school. Linguistic sweeteners, semantic somersaults,   and surrogate vocabularies are repeatedly employed. Schools in which as few as three or four per-cent of students   may be white or Southeast Asian or of Middle Eastern origin, for   instance—and where every other child in the building is black or   Hispanic—are referred to, in a commonly misleading usage, as “diverse.”   Visitors to schools like these discover quickly the eviscerated meaning   of the word, which is no longer a descriptor but a euphemism for a   plainer word that has apparently become unspeakable.The New York Times Bestseller","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302886691045,"sku":"NP9781400052455","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400052455.jpg?v=1767741487","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-shame-of-the-nation-isbn-9781400052455","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}