Excerpts from Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation

In The Shame of the Nation, Jonathan 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 Introduction & Chapter One

Excerpt from Chapter Nine

…In the Milwaukee area, for instance, 22 suburban districts presently participate in a student-transfer program to promote school integration across district lines, which has been in operation now for nearly 30 years. Under the program, 4,200 students transfer between Milwaukee and its suburbs. In the middle-class suburb of Shorewood, for example, 11 percent of the student population comes into the district from Milwaukee.

Including minority children who already live in Shorewood, says Jack Linehan, the recently retired superintendent, “our school district is about 19 percent Black and Hispanic, and the community has a great comfort level with that. . . . I think parents got to know each other as friends. . . . I think that evaporated away a lot of the psychological resistance. . . .” Linehan also notes that starting integration in the elementary grades made it much easier for children “simply to be children with each other.”

Stereotypes fall away, he adds—“it’s more difficult to conjure up ‘the other’—when you’re building sand castles together.”

… In the Louisville area, as well, school integration, initially carried out under court order, has now been in place without court order for a quarter-century. The sweep of the program, under which the city’s schools and county schools have been combined into a single system in which more than 90,000 Black, Hispanic, white, and Asian children are enrolled, has had the effect of rendering Kentucky’s public schools the most desegregated in the nation. The typical Black student in Kentucky now attends a school in which two thirds of the enrollment is Caucasian…

Public policy has largely turned its back upon the aspirations represented by these instances of school desegregation. “Even many Black leaders,” notes education analyst Richard Rothstein, weary of the struggle over mandatory busing programs to achieve desegregation, “have given up on integration,” arguing, in his words, that “a Black child does not need white classmates in order to learn.” So education policies, instead, he says, “now aim to raise scores in [the] schools that black children attend.”

“That effort,” he writes, “will be flawed even if it succeeds.” The 1954 decision, he reminds us, “was not about raising scores” for children of minorities “but about giving Black children access to majority culture, so they could negotiate it more confidently. . . . For African-Americans to have equal opportunity, higher test scores will not suffice. It is foolhardy to think Black children can be taught, no matter how well, in isolation and then have the skills and confidence as adults to succeed in a white world where they have no experience.”

…In the program here in Massachusetts, parents tell me that their children often visit or stay over at each other’s homes, spend time on holidays together, and, in several cases of which I’ve been told, have also chosen colleges together.

No matter what the social obstacles that children, both minority and white, must learn to overcome, no matter what the necessary games that must be played and roles that must be filled in adolescent years (the emphasis on style differences, and music tastes, and all the rest of what may seem to separate them at the start), a strange phenomenon—normality, humanity—kicks in; and, not in every case, but far more often than a social order with our racial history has reason to expect, they do reach out across the structural divide time and again and we are better, as a nation, for the consequence.

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.