Class divide
IN the same way the searing images of New Orleans’ post-Katrina dispossessed -- poor, black, herded together in squalor and left by officialdom to fend for themselves -- brought into focus hidden dimensions of poverty and its nexus with race, social critic Jonathan Kozol’s latest book shines a spotlight on poor, minority children, sabotaged and isolated by an educational system tilted to slight them.
In “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America,” Kozol presents discouraged children, demoralized teachers and anxious principals to show how African American and Latino children suffer in what have become segregated inner-city schools, shortchanged by inequities in school funding, low academic expectations and pervasive neglect.
The remedies Kozol offers in this passionate plea to integrate schools are as imperfect and inadequate as the options offered Gulf Coast hurricane survivors, but his arguments breathe life into a withering civil-rights battle. He contends that the legal dismantling of segregated education, begun more than 50 years ago with Brown vs. Board of Education, has been upended by restrictive legal rulings, uneven funding mandates and our collective disregard for the poor, leaving millions of black and Latino students trapped in educational wastelands.
Drawing on visits to dozens of cities and comparisons of inner-city campuses to their suburban counterparts, Kozol paints a stark portrait of official deprivation, linking differences in funding, curriculum and teacher quality to race and socioeconomic class. The territory is familiar for the 68-year-old Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar, who has devoted 40 years to cataloging and battling racial discrimination in education. His latest book goes beyond conventional laments -- supply shortages, overcrowding, dilapidated campuses -- to the essence of education, demonstrating how a new wave of curricular reforms contributes to the destructive status quo.
Black and Latino children -- saddled with inexperienced teachers, low expectations and unforgiving, relentless high-stakes exams -- are controlled by commands, regimentation and lock-step lessons that stifle their imagination and sap their spirits, he says. Suburban white children are taught in comfortable classrooms where they are treated collegially and offered lessons intended to stimulate their innate thirst for knowledge.
The implications are clear. White children are being prepared to think creatively, to reason, to lead; minorities to provide a compliant workforce capable of following orders. The differences are not happenstance but by design, Kozol says. The cost is disengagement, hopelessness and a rising dropout rate -- approaching 50% among black and Latino teens -- that ought to be a national source of shame.
In California schools, Kozol found a “harsher reality” than almost anywhere else. “Tensions were greater, pressure to conform to very rigid state curricular requirements was more severe, and physical conditions in most of the schools I visited were more discouraging,” he writes. California officials recently acknowledged as much, agreeing last year to spend more than $1 billion on school improvements to settle a lawsuit accusing the state of denying poor children adequate textbooks, trained teachers and safe classrooms.
Nearly 1 million black and Latino students attend California schools with few if any whites -- more than triple the number 20 years ago. Kozol’s conversations with many of these students convey the corrosive effect such second-class status implies. The struggling youngsters he highlights may not have learned enough to pass algebra, but they can calculate their worth.
At Fremont High in South-Central Los Angeles, a sobbing Latina wonders why she and her friends are routinely assigned classes in hairdressing or sewing, even though they would like to go to college. A cynical classmate provides the answer: College is the province of suburban kids. “You’re ghetto, so we send you to the factory,” he says. “You’re ghetto, so you sew.”
But how do you integrate schools like Fremont High in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where fewer than 1 student in 10 is white and half the system’s 700 campuses have few or no white students? This dilemma exists in huge swaths of urban America, where schools are segregated because neighborhoods are segregated. The country’s retreat from integration owes as much to that as to any moral failing.
Kozol’s prescription doesn’t adequately address practical roadblocks like housing patterns or the fact that busing has been tried across the country and largely failed, sabotaged by white flight. He proposes expanding housing options for poor families in middle-class communities, but we have seen such ideas vigorously resisted by suburbanites. And giving preferences to minority applicants at prestigious public schools has been deemed unfair, if not illegal.
That is the irony and the flaw of “The Shame of the Nation.” Kozol sensibly identifies the problem -- the depth and persistence of inequality between minorities and whites -- yet he fails to see that the attitudes and circumstances that create the problem are precisely what doom his solution. He believes that desegregation can succeed if we declare it a national priority. But that presumption ignores political and personal realities and invites a larger and more troubling question: If Americans can muster the will for the arduous and expensive task of integrating schools, why can’t we harness that will to improve conditions in the schools minorities attend now?
Kozol argues that integration confers benefits beyond the academic, that social isolation handicaps minority students, who will be forced to compete in predominantly white “mainstream” America. But within the next five years, one-third of U.S. residents will be black, Latino or Asian. By 2050, only half of Americans will be white. Kozol could have made a more compelling case by devoting even a single chapter to the benefits white students would reap from integrated schools. There is a more fundamental problem. Education is one area where parents feel entitled to put their child’s welfare ahead of the collective good. That is why, despite consistent support among all races for the ideal of integration, the popularity of voluntary integration programs is fading. Minority parents are weary of carrying the burden -- busing their kids to faraway schools -- and middle-class parents of all races and ethnicity want campuses free from what they consider “ghetto” problems.
Is integration the only, or even the best, way to improve the education of minority students? After all, schools are inadequate and children disadvantaged not just because their campuses are all black or all Latino but because they are neglected and poor.
In fact, race and poverty are impossible to untangle. In schools that are more than 90% black or Latino, almost 9 of 10 children are from poor families. Schools built around middle-class assumptions -- that every kid has a computer, a quiet place to do homework, access to libraries and cultural institutions -- might not meet the needs of children growing up with poorly educated parents in the chaos and deprivation that poverty breeds.
Kozol’s vision also ignores the social costs to minority children of integration, even when it succeeds. Look closely at most integrated schools and a disturbing picture emerges: honors classes made up of white and Asian students; blacks and Latinos tracked into remedial classes; racial disparities in grades, discipline referrals, extracurricular participation. True integration is hard, expensive and ongoing; without it, a desegregated school is simply a microcosm of our racially stratified nation, with blacks and Latinos on the lowest rungs.
Still, it is hard not to be moved by the observation of a New York third-grader named Alliyah in a letter asking Kozol to visit her South Bronx campus: “You have all the things and we do not have all the things. Can you help us?”
Kozol blames official indifference and societal malaise for the deepening divide between America’s Alliyahs and its Emilys, its Jeremys and Jamals. He is correct, and his outrage ought to infect us. But any real solution lies in convincing America’s majority that it is in everyone’s interest to bridge the gap, whether through more and better efforts at integration or increased funding and attention to minority schools.
Kozol’s book engages the heart and mind. But the question is no longer: When will America value its black and Latino children enough to guarantee them access to white schools? Rather it is: When will we value them enough to guarantee them safe campuses, competent teachers and a curriculum that engages, challenging the mind and nourishing the spirit, so that the bounty of America is finally theirs to enjoy? *
