I have a crush on Jonathan Kozol. It’s OK; my husband knows all about it, and he’s fine with it. Seriously, any man who can say to conservative members of Congress, who challenge him that “throwing money at our failing schools isn’t going to solve the problem”: “Just try! Drop it from helicopters! Throw it at them! Let’s see what happens! It works for Harvard!” is a rock star in my book.
I’ve read all of his books, and they all made me mad. Most also made me write checks. All have made me ask hard questions about my own life and how I am, in many ways conscious and unconscious, contributing to the perpetuation of our nation’s greatest injustices.
But perhaps none hit as close to home as Shame of a Nation: The Restoring of Apartheid Schooling in America.
See, I just looked up the statistics, and, while I knew that the elementary school our kids will go to is mostly white, I didn’t know it was 94% white. I feel like writing that in huge letters, because it’s shocking. Even worse, the high school, with a much larger catchment area, that we really thought was fairly diverse, is 91% white. As in NINETY-ONE PERCENT WHITE. And how, exactly, do I expect my kids to receive a truly great education–not just with chess club and Spanish classes and an elementary science lab, which they will have, but with classmates who look like the United States of America–when more than 9/10 of those classmates are white? But more importantly, how do I expect other people’s children, children of color, to receive a truly great education when there are, by demographic eventuality, so few white kids left to go to their schools with them?
Kozol’s book starts with the assertion that we must name the problem ‘segregation’ in order to solve it, and 317 pages later, he really leaves no doubt. Our schools are systematically, almost intentionally, failing students of color, preparing them only for employment, not for democracy, and oftentimes not even preparing them well for employment. We’re teaching to the test, suppressing dissent, pretending that the civil rights movement is over, and thanking our ‘lucky stars’ that our kids go to the good (read: white) schools. We’re spending the few tax dollars that legislatures are willing to appropriate to buy highly regimented, patented curricula that actually reflect very low expectations for our children of color, and that drive the best teachers farther away from those struggling schools.
And then parents, not unlike me, move to places that have ‘good’ schools, where teachers can encourage kids to ask questions, where everyone gets a textbook, where it’s safe to go out to recess…and we take our tax dollars with us. We (okay, this part is not actually me) contribute to private foundations that funnel even more money to our kids’ schools, and then we act like they’re inherently smarter, more ambitious, more ‘scholarly’ than the kids who have been taught, from a young age, that they don’t matter. We know that our housing values are artificially high, in part, because inner-city schools are struggling; we see that we could get a lot more house on the other side of the state line, and that feels yucky. We hope that our kids won’t stare when we see black people, that they’ll know how to exist in a multicultural society, that they’ll somehow learn what we say and not what we do, and we feel pretty horrible about it.
And it looks a whole lot like 1953. And now I have to figure out what to do about it, not just as a Board member of an organization that fights for equity and excellence in Kansas schools and an advocate for social justice, but also as a mom.
Why the Supreme Court Matters–Educational Apartheid
So Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of a Nation didn’t just make me question my own children’s educational futures in their very white schools. It also made me very, very, very angry at the Supreme Court.
In June 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a potentially fatal blow to one of our nation’s most foundational court decisions and to the bedrock of educational equity in modern U.S. society. The Court overturned two lower court opinions that allow local school districts to develop and implement integration plans to achieve educational equity through racial balancing. Even more perverse than the decision itself was the fact that the conservative majority of the Court opined in its opinion that this ruling was somehow in keeping with the spirit of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education and quoted from the landmark case. I hated the decision at the time, perhaps especially from my vantage point as an advocate from the home state of the Brown decision, but I grew to hate it more and more and more as I read Kozol’s forays into highly segregated schools and reflected on how the Supreme Court has, essentially, issued a ruling more in keeping with Plessy v. Ferguson, claiming that, despite all we have learned about the evils of segregation, that separate can be equal.
Segregated schools, we have to remember, are not only severe societal ills in and of themselves. They also foment division and continued injustice throughout life, both as a result of the inferior educations afforded in all-’minority’ schools, and because, without the opportunities to learn alongside each other, today’s youth are likely to perpetuate racial division as they grow. The return of ‘apartheid schooling’ is also a moral defeat for the forces of civil rights; as one of the most visible and hardest-fought victories, its erosion today takes an inevitable toll on the continued momentum for justice. As Kozol writes, “I cannot discern the slightest hint that any vestige of the legal victory embodied in Brown v. Board of Education or the moral mandate that a generation of unselfish activists and young idealists lives and sometimes died for has survived within these schools and neighborhoods.” That’s ugly. And it has serious consequences. How can we build a thriving democracy without the full contributions of our youth of color?
Kozol’s book was published in 2005, prior to these turn-back-the-clock decisions and shortly after the related court decisions that dismantled much of the Affirmative Action framework that was starting to ensure a pipeline of highly-educated leaders of color for our classrooms and central offices and statehouses. That knowledge made me cringe, wondering how much worse things may get, now that school districts have lost some of their more effective tools for achieving integration, even against public will. Kozol is honest about the political and even practical difficulties in achieving real integration, especially in light of increasing residential segregation, and we as social justice advocates have to be also. But we also have to be honest about the costs of succumbing to these difficulties, about the destruction of young lives and entire communities, and the decimation of our hopes for a recovery from racism. And, as Kozol points out, the idea that institutionalized racism could be dismantled in the South seemed quite improbable, even impossible, 60 years ago, too.
The U.S. Supreme Court is surely not solely to blame for this resegregation of American schools. By failing to provide financial incentives for integration, or even to fully fund schools populated by students of color, Congress shares some of the fault. So, too, do urban planners and real estate developers, inadequately courageous school personnel, and suburban parents like me. But the reason that we have a judicial system in the first place is so that these crucially important issues of social justice, vulnerable to political pressures, can be decided in the light of our constitutional protections rather than the whims of the electorate or the fear of the cowardly many.
And they’re not doing their job.
So, now, rather than integration, which really was working during the very few years and in the relatively few places that it was energetically pursued, we have ‘school reform’, euphemistic and cynical attempts to give students of color as equal an education possible in a segregated environment. We smile and say that ‘money isn’t everything’ when talking about underfunded, minority-heavy schools, while fighting to the death over school funding for our kids’ schools (where, apparently, money does matter?). We intervene all the time in these schools when it comes to standards and scrutiny, but then call for ‘local control’ on issues of funding equity. We administer the same standardized tests to students of color and call it accountability, without ever holding ourselves or our elected officials accountable for providing real educational opportunities to those kids before testing day. We pretend that technology, or having an African-American President, or something else makes today fundamentally different than 1953, and that, somehow, today, separate can be equal.
We, in essence, lie, to ourselves and to our children, and the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to go along with it. And, so, when social workers wonder why the judicial system matters, or how it really impacts social policy, I wish that I could speak just in vague generalities, or speak just about the past: about Brown v. Board, about welfare rights, about those cases back then. But, unfortunately, we need look no further than our classrooms, and what our nation has decided to do to children of color.
But all is not lost. If the third branch of government isn’t going to fulfill its role, then it is again going to depend on the ultimate moral watchdog: the consciences of people of good will, those of us committed to social justice and capable of mustering moral outrage at what is surely an abomination. It wouldn’t be the first time that the purportedly apolitical Supreme Court has followed, not led, the call for justice from the streets. What we need, as Kozol persuasively states, is a good battle cry. And ‘adequacy’ isn’t going to cut it. We have to call segregation racism, and call that racism wrong, and take a stand for the future of our children, and those children we are reluctant to claim. We owe it to them, and we owe it to Linda Brown, her parents, and other warriors for justice who dared to state the obvious: separate was not, is not, and can never be equal.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged education, racism, reviews, social justice