Excerpts from Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation

In The Shame of the Nation, Kozol shows, with hard numbers and personal stories, the impact on children of the growing resegregation of America's public schools. He advocates a new national movement to finally achieve the integrated education dream of the 20th century civil rights movement.
 
The following exerpts are from the introduction, chapter one, and chapter nine of The Shame of the Nation.

• Excerpt from Chapter Nine

Excerpt from Introduction & Chapter One

A teacher at P.S. 65, one of the South Bronx elementary schools I’ve visited repeatedly, once pointed out to me one of the two white children I had ever seen there. His presence in her class was something of a wonderment to her and to the other pupils. I asked how many white kids she had taught in the South Bronx in her career. “I’ve been at this school for 18 years,” she said. “This is the first white student I have ever taught.”...

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.

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….

In the following year, when she was in fourth grade, Pineapple had four different teachers in a row. … Pineapple, who had always been a lively and resilient little girl, grew quite depressed that year. 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. 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.

“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?” “Over where?” I asked.

“Over--you know . . . ,” she said with another bit of awkwardness and hesitation in her eyes.

I asked her, “Do you mean in Massachusetts?”

She looked at me with more determination and a bit impatiently, I thought, but maybe also recognized that I was feeling slightly awkward too.

“You know . . . ,” she said.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“Over there--where other people are,” she finally said.

Jonathan Kozol is the National Book Award-winning author of Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities, and Amazing Grace . He has been working with children from inner-city schools for more than 40 years.