Shame of the Nation: the Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

Jonathan Kozol

Much of the inequality among schools and many of the problems with public K-12 education in the US stem from the way in which schools are largely funded from local funds. Somewhere around 45% of these funds are collected from local taxes by my last knowledge. I remember this being something of a revelation when I was a 22 year old teacher but now I have accepted it and feel like most people are aware that the system is structured in this way.

Kozol does not propose taking money from richer districts and redistributing to poorer districts outright. However, he does ridicule the idea of the funding of poorer districts being raised to an "adequate" level. This may be where I disagree with him. I think bringing inadequately funded schools to a funding level adequate to allow students and teachers to fully prepare for the accountability-based tests that have since even before no-child-left-behind would be a huge victory for education. Of course, it is ridiculous that this is not the norm.

However, the subject of this book is not primarily funding inequalities. Instead, Kozol hammers away at the point that in the inadequately funded, urban school systems that were once integrated racially and now lack white students, the black and hispanic students are not being prepared to be successful in a country in which whites are the majority because they are not learning how to interact with whites in their formative years. on the one hand this seems like common sense and on the other it would seem hard to prove empirically.

I highly recommend this book as it does what good books do: provoke a lot of thought and contemplation on possibilities and make one think that something could possibly come of you reading it.