shame of the nation

This is my first countdown paper; it covers the first six chapters of Jonathan
Kozol's The Shame of the Nation.

Countdown Paper:
The Shame of the Nation Chapters 1 – 6


5 Big Picture Sentences
The first six chapters of this text have focused on the inequalities that exist in America today. Kozol said that his goal in writing this book was to “unlock the chains” that separated children from the American mainstream. His research is particularly interesting and poignant because he has visited schools all over the country and formed lasting friendships with many students in order to write this book, and because he himself taught in segregated schools when he was a young man. Kozol has discussed the disparities in physical school buildings, programs offered, curriculum taught, parent fundraising, and availability of quality preschools and other special schools. For the most part, I agree with Kozol’s philosophy, even though at times the issues he raises seem dramatic or overwhelming.


4 Key Passages
pg. 36 - 37 “Few teachers that I know who work with kids in inner-city schools question whether this self-doubt is real – nor whether, especially among pre-teens and adolescents, and particularly boys, this sense of doubt is reinforced by pressure from those of their peers who have succumbed already to the cynicism that is commonly a cover-up for fear… rarely in suburban schools where the potential of most children is assumed… They tell us we are in a world where hope must be constructed therapeutically because so much of it has been destroyed by the conditions of internment in which we have placed these children.”

pg. 43 “When minority parents ask for something better for their kids, she says, ‘the assumption is that these are parents who can be discounted. These are kids that we don’t value.”

pg. 48 “’Inequality is not an intentional thing…’”

pg. 84 - 85 “…they can at least provide the artificial community afforded by a set of scripted lessons that leave little to the competence of teachers and can be delivered by a person who has never studied education and has no familiarity with the developmental needs of children… So a curriculum that was imposed, in part, to compensate for staffing needs of schools that had a hard time in recruiting teachers ends up by driving out precisely those well-educated men and women whom school systems have worked so hard to attract into these neighborhoods.”


3 Key Terms
resegregation – the regressive move towards separation based on race in neighborhoods and schools

“separate but equal” – the precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson that was later struck down in Brown v. Board regarded the legality of having separate facilities for blacks and whites

school reform – “new vocabularies… new systems of incentive and new modes of castigation, which are termed “rewards and sanctions,” curriculum based on goals and standards chosen by the government, a “relentless emphasis on raising test scores, rigid policies of nonpromotion and nongradation, a new empiricism and the imposition of unusually detailed lists of named and numbered ‘outcomes’”, and “terminology that comes out of the world of industry and commerce”


2 Connections
On page 71, Kozol talks about how teachers in the “Success for All” program were discouraged from “verbal deviations or impromptu bits of conversation” because of their strict time schedule. While I was reading this, I was shocked because this is exactly the opposite of what I learned about how to have effective reading sessions with children in Early Learning Literacy. Children learn a story best when they interact with it, talk about it, and tear it apart and think about it. In fact, we learned that the story reading was really secondary to the conversation that came about because of the story.

Chapter 5, which spoke about the negative effects of standardized testing on the nation as a whole and on inner-city students in particular, reminded me a lot of the research paper I wrote last year about No Child Left Behind. I wrote a lot about NCLB’s ridiculous provision which shoved low-performing students from one failing school to another school with the expectation that they would do better at the now overcrowded and understaffed schools, so that discussion was familiar. Kozol also mentioned Rod Paige, and his articles were very useful since he was one of the main proponents of NCLB.


1 Question
In light of all of this overwhelming information about the realities of our broken-down system, how can we as educators do something about it?