Shame of the Nations - Exam 1 Essay

Jonathan Kozol - The Shame of the Nation: Essay 1

Dear President Obama,

I am so honored to have been selected to serve on the “U.S. Commission for Improving the Quality of Education Opportunity for Marginalized Children in the United States.” I believe that many improvements can be made in order to improve our nations education system. These changes should be implemented as soon as possible, so that the students of America can have the best education possible, no matter what their background, race, or socioeconomic status is.

Jonathan Kozol’s book, the Shame of the Nation, declares that the United States of America contains “apartheid schooling,” which is segregation in schools based on race. The first thought most people have when they hear the term apartheid is Africa. It may be shocking, but there is apartheid right here in our own country.

When Kozol began visiting schools in New York City, he found that “virtually all the children of black and Hispanic people in the cities that I visited, both large and small, were now attending schools in which their isolation was as absolute as it had been for children in the school which I’d started out so many years before.” (8) In the New York City schools, Kozol saw that segregation appeared worse in the late 1990’s, and early 2000’s, than it appeared before the Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education. Our nation is backtracking in regards to segregation, and most inner city schools now hold mainly African Americans and Hispanics. Kozol claims that the United States are becoming re-segregated, and that our nation is settling for “separate but equal,” the decision made in Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896.

This could be to due to an increase in white flight, which is when white families leave their neighborhood when other races start moving into their neighborhood. This is a difficult problem to fix because there is no way to stop a white family from moving out of their neighborhood and into a different school zone that is more preferable to them. “Some of our most segregated urban neighborhoods lie just adjacent to well-funded districts serving middle-class communities. Less than a fifteen-minute bus ride often separates our wealthiest and poorest schooling systems.”(Kozol, 204) This issue has been increasing the re-segregation of the American schools lately, and it is a complicated problem to fix. Some options are to rezone, or get rid of zoning entirely, but then parents of students who are already in the nicer school districts will have an issue with newcomers coming into their district.

An issue Kozol talks about with the inner city schools is the curriculum. Many schools are given their curriculum from the government, like SFA, and the teachers are forced to teach these exactly as they are given. Kozol said he observed many classrooms where this curriculum was in effect, and saw many things he was not fond of. Students were not allowed to talk for the most part, which is a critical part of learning, and student and teacher interaction was very minimal. Another issue was that many schools tell their students that their goal in life should be to become a manager, and they promote this by putting them in work related classes. They often do not inform students that they have the option to attend college, and receive a higher education. I think this is sad, and is something that needs to be changed in these schools, but students should know that they can reach for a higher goal and attain it. A manager could be a great position, but if a student wants to have a different career, they should know they have that option.

Another issue that Kozol explores in these urban schools is standardized testing. In schools where students generally score well on their standardized exams, their curriculum does not need to be centered around these tests. In urban schools, where students often do poorly on these standardized tests, the curriculum is solely focused on passing these tests. Kozol says, “Even in good suburban schools where scores are generally high, I don’t know how many principals and teachers believe that the repeated measuring of children’s skills by standardized exams has a positive effect upon the processes of education; I know many more who feel it has the opposite result.” (page 110) I agree with Kozol on this point because teachers have their students memorize and repeat the information they need to know for the test, instead of checking whether students understand the information.

A lot of teachers are motivated this way because they will get rewards from the school if their students do well, and if the students as a whole do well, then the school will be given more financial aide. Kozol writes about districts, especially in Houston, lying about scores, and drop out rates in order for their school to get backed financially. I understand that schools need to be kept accountable for what they teach in some form, but I feel that the standardized tests that are given at this time are not necessarily doing their job, and are not helping students learn.

Urban schools also spend a lot less money per student, and this means that these students will not have the resources that a more wealthy school would have. Although money is not the cause of learning, money comes with the benefits of better teachers, textbooks, materials and other resources. “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 the kids they don’t value.” (Kozol, 43) These are the students who will not get the best education because of a situation they were born into, and that should not be okay. Everyone child in the United States should be able to get a quality education if they wish to do so.

The re-segregation in United States schooling is a condition that needs to be examined carefully. It is obvious that the situation is not getting any better, and multiple political leaders have unsuccessfully attempted to implement change. “But if the past may be relied upon to make predictions for the future, we may sensibly expect that much of what is promised in the present set of goals, no matter how thy dominate the national attention at the present time, will be retracted, or amended, or diluted, or else more or less forgotten long before that very distant date arrives.” (Kozol 205) We need to focus our attention on this issue, and make change happen, unlike what has been done in the past. I look forward to working with you and hearing your input.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Cavender