Highlights from Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation

A must read. Here, my favorite excerpts:

But history teaches us that every good idea contains the seeds of its own heresy and "much of what is going on in the name of standards and accountability verges on the heretical... We are giving kids less and calling it more," "limiting what we teach" to what "we can easily measure." (pg. 131)

There are hundreds of principals in our urban schools who are authentic heroes, few of whom would emulate the posturing and bluster of Joe Clark and most of whom do not receive the notice and support that they deserve. But there is a difference between recognizing the accomplishments of able school officials and the marketing of individuals as saviors of persistently unequal systems. As with the hero children, so too with the hero principals, there is this inclination to avert our eyes from the pervasive injuries inflicted upon students by our acquiescence in a dual system and to convey the tantalizing notion that the problems of this system can be superseded somehow by a faith in miracles embodied in dynamic and distinctive individuals. I don't believe that this is true. I don't believe a good school or a good school system can be built on miracles or on the stunning inteventions of dramatically original and charismatic men or women. I don't think anyone really believes this. (pg. 200)

Playing games of musical chairs with children's lives, when half the chairs are broken and the best chairs are reserved primarily for people of his class and race, is cynical behavior in a president. (pg. 204)

"Before we gave up on integration, we should have tried it," wrote Jack White, a columnist for Time magazine, nearly ten years ago. (pg. 216)

"Even many black leaders," notes educatoin 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 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."

"We adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding. For a vested interest in understanding is more preciously guarded than any other treasure. It is why men react, not infrequently with something akin to religious passion, to the defense of what they have so laboriously learned." (pg. 268)

If the differentness of children of minorities is seen as so extreme as to require an entire inventory of "appropriate" approaches built around the proclamation of their absolute uniqueness from the other children of this nation, it begins to seem not only sensible but maybe even ethically acceptable to isolate them as compeltely as we can, either in the segregated schools they now attend or else in wholly separate tracks within those schools in which some mix of economic class and race may now and then prevail.

The insistence upon nothing less than a distinctive pedagogy for these children makes it easier, of course, for parents of the middle class and upper middle class to put away for good whatever inclinations some initially may have to see their children educated in the same schools as black and Hispanic children. Why, they understandably may ask, should they inflict upon their children a compendium of stick-and-carrot practices and strange salutes and silent signals and direct commands modeled upon military terminology when they have reason to believe their children can be educated well and wisely by instructional techniques that draw upon a child's thirst for learning rather than relying on the inculcation of docility and fear? Why should their children be denied exposure to the arts and music, history and science? Why should they also lose the healthy exercise of recess? (pg. 272)

"I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations," the president said again in his campaign for reelection in September 2004. "It's working. It's making a difference." It is one of those deadly lies which, by sheer repetition, is at length accepted by large numbers of Americans as, perhaps, a rough approximation of the truth. But it is not the truth, and it is not an innocent misstatement of the facts. It is a devious appeasement of the heartache of the parents of the black and brown and poor and, if it is not forcefully resisted and denounced, it is going to lead our nation even further in a perilous direction. (pg. 284)

What, we may ask, is missing from this purely economic explanation of the motives that bring thousands of unselfish men and women into public schools each year and lead many to remain within these schools and classrooms during the full course of their career? One thing it lacks is any recognition of the role of altruistic and protective feelings, empathetic fascination, love of children, love of learning in itself, with all the mysteries and all the miracles and all the moments of transcendence. Teachers often cry on the last day of school. Is this because their paychecks are so small? Is it because they think themselves to be "the lowliest of bureaucrats" in Mr. Chubb and Mr. Moe's unfortunately chosen words? Or is it because they know that they will miss those children terribly? (pg. 296-297)

Now segregation seems almost to be the order of the day. We don't have many people who believe that integration's even possible or worth attempting anymore, not in the government at least. You don't hear it from the president or other leaders in Washington. You don't hear it being mentioned in political campaigns. We've made a mockery of the decision of court in 1954 and yet we continue to commemorate its anniversaries.

"What is it that we are commemorating then? We commemorate the decision in itself. We commemorate the individuals who fought for it. We commemorate the bravery of students who risked life and limb to act upon it after it had been decided. But in terms of making real that promise in the years that have gone by since then, I think we know it's been betrayed. I don't believe that this is something we can hide under the rug. I don't think we can sweep it into a dark corner. As long as this continues we will be divided as a nation. It's in our national interest to address this and confront it openly. I don't think that we can be at peace with ourselves as a society until we do." (Congressman John Lewis, Georgia, pg. 311)

"Sometimes, you have to ask for something that you know you may not get. And still you have to ask for it. It's still worth fighting for and, even if you don't believe that you will see it in your lifetime, you have got to hold it up so that the generation that comes next will take it from your hands and, in their own time, see it as a goal worth fighting for again.

"A segregated education in America is unacceptable. Integration is, it still remains, the goal worth fighting for. You should be fighting for it. We should be fighting for it. It is something that is good unto itself, apart from all the other arguments that can be made. This nation needs to be a family, and a family sits down for its dinner at a table, and we all deserve a place together at that table. And our children deserve to have a place together in their schools and classrooms, and they need to have that opportunity while they're still children, while they're in those years of innocence.

"You cannot deviate from this. You have to say, 'Some things are good and right unto themselves.' No matter what the present mood in Washington is like, no matter what the people who are setting policy today believe, or want us to believe, no matter what the sense of temporary hopelessness that many of us often feel, we cannot give up on the struggle we began and on the dream that brought us here.

"You cannot give it up. We cannot give it up. As a nation, as a people, I don't think that we have any choice but to reject this acquiescence, to reject defeat." (Lewis, pg. 316-317)