Exam One: The Shame of the Nation Essay

Jonathan Kozol - The Shame of the Nation: Essay 1

You have been appointed by President Obama to serve as a teacher representative on the “U.S. Commission for Improving the Quality of Education Opportunity for Marginalized Children in the United States.” In particular, President Obama is curious about your opinions on Jonathan Kozol’s book entitled The Shame of the Nation. The President has asked you to summarize Kozol’s primary theses as represented in the book, support or refute Kozol’s claims of “Apartheid Schooling” in the U.S., and provide your own recommendations on improving the quality of education opportunity for marginalized children in the United States. President Obama has asked you to submit to him a letter that is no longer than 3 pages addressing these issues and providing specific citations (i.e., book, notes, documents) to support your answers.

Mr. President:
It is a great honor to serve on the U.S. Commission for Improving the Quality of Education Opportunity for Marginalized Children in the United States. My thoughts concerning the education of marginalized children have been greatly influenced by Jonathan Kozol’s book The Shame of the Nation (2005), and I will be referencing this work in my reply. This text focuses on the inequalities that exist in America today. In fact, Kozol said that his goal in writing this book was to “unlock the chains” that separated children from the American mainstream (p. 6). 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.
America, the country lauded as the “land of opportunity,” for centuries the destination of countless immigrants searching for freedom, equality, and the chance to make something of themselves, truly has an ugly secret: an apartheid schooling system, segregated by race, socioeconomic level, and class. We are willing to fight wars in order to spread democracy abroad, yet our own school system is anything but democratic. Immediately contradicting the Brown vs. Board ruling and the 14th Amendment, children who live in U.S. ghettoes receive an inherently unequal education from that which schoolchildren in affluent suburban areas receive. In the neighborhoods in which Kozol observed, “residential segregation was a permanent reality” (p. 7), a result of “white flight” – a phenomenon which describes the movement of those who can afford it away from urban areas and ghettoes, creating the dichotomy of well-off suburban areas just miles away from the devastation of the projects. Since public schools are funded by the taxes of their surrounding neighborhoods, of course this economic discrepancy translates into major inequalities in the schools.
In The Shame of the Nation, Kozol discussed the disparities in physical school buildings, quality of teachers, curriculum taught, parent fundraising, availability of quality preschools and other special schools, and programs and courses offered. In looking at each of these inequalities, the real question addressed will be: what is the worth of each child in these situations?
In Kozol’s introduction, he recalls the conditions in which he first taught; two fourth grade classes, a drama group, and a class of girls learning to sew all shared an auditorium (p. 3). His own experience does not differ dramatically from others’. Aside from basic maintenance and cleanliness, many of these schools are actually unsanitary and hazardous. At the 75th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles, a letter had to be sent home because there were rats, exposed asbestos, and chipping lead-based paint on the campus (p. 172). There is also a major difference in available resources. One Sacramento student said that in computer class, “we sit there and talk about what we would be doing if we have computers” (p. 171). Juxtapose this with high schools with multiple computer labs filled with the most recent technology. Are not the children in that Sacramento school worth as much as the children in these schools?
Another key problem is the quality of teachers. One of the hardest obstacles is recruiting good teachers, especially when schools in which it would be easier to teach can offer them so much more money and job security. In troubled schools in need of the best and brightest teachers, teachers are demoted from their role of cultivating learning to merely reading off scripted lessons plans. “So,” Kozol concludes, “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” (p. 85). This curriculum, especially the Skinnerian Approach with its strange, silent signals mentioned in chapter 3, creates zombies rather than individuals who can think deeply for themselves. Kozol makes the interesting point that in these schools, “hope must be constructed therapeutically because so much of it has been destroyed by the conditions… in which we have placed these children” (p. 37), whereas hope exists naturally “in suburban schools where the potential of most children is assumed” (p. 36).
Some of the most alarming consequences of this apartheid schooling system are the dramatically different tracks offered to students: academic tracks for those children deemed to have worth, who will go to college and become successful, and vocational tracks for those children who need to be realistic and learn a trade because they will never amount to anything other than, hopefully, a skilled worker. In one elementary school in which managerial skills were emphasized to a shocking extent, the principal responded to Kozol’s questioning by saying, “Even if you have a felony arrest… we want you to understand that you can be a manager someday” (p. 93). These unbelievably low expectations carry over to the high schools, too. Mireya, a student at Fremont High School, dreams of being a doctor, but she was forced to take sewing, hairdressing, and “Life Skills” classes (p. 179). Mireya confided in Kozol, “I did not need sewing either. I knew how to sew. My mother is a seamstress in a factory. I’m trying to go to college. I don’t need to sew to go to college… I hoped for something else” (p. 180). Surely an honors student in suburban America would not be put into classes like these, and most definitely not against her will.
These major discrepancies are simply the most noticeable of the many perversions of democracy in America’s current school system. While many of us can try to ignore it, those who are living it cannot. In a conversation with Kozol, Noreen Connell said, “When minority parents ask for something better for their kids… ‘the assumption is that these are parents who can be discounted. These are kids that we don’t value’” (p. 43). And when we try to smooth over these issues, we are confirming her sad statement. We must figure out the worth of every child, and act accordingly.
Sincerely,
Amber Hatchett