Illustration: Barbara Miner
The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
In his newest book, Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities, exposes the shameful levels of segregation and inequality present in U.S. schools.
In researching the book, Kozol visited nearly 60 schools in 11 states in the past five years and notes that the level of segregation today is higher than any time since 1968. His book is a fierce indictment of segregation, funding inequalities, and the "drill-and-kill" curricula that are heavily promoted in schools that serve low-income students and students of color. Kozol's book calls upon us to confront and remedy the dire system of inequality that reigns in U.S. schools today.
One of the most disheartening experiences for those who grew up in the years when Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall were alive is to visit public schools today that bear their names, or names of other honored leaders of integration struggles that produced the temporary progress that took place in the three decades after Brown, and to find how many of these schools are bastions of contemporary segregation. It is even more disheartening when schools like these are not in segregated neighborhoods but in racially mixed areas in which integration of a public school would seem to be most natural and where, indeed, it takes a conscious effort on the part of parents or school officials in these districts to avoid the integration option that is often right at their front door.
In a Seattle neighborhood, for instance, where approximately half the families were Caucasian, 95 percent of students at Thurgood Marshall Elementary School were black, Hispanic, Native American, or of Asian origin. An African-American teacher at the school told me of seeing clusters of white parents and their children on the corner of a street close to the school each morning waiting for a bus that took the children to a school in which she believed that the enrollment was predominantly white. She did not speak of the white families waiting for the bus to take their children to another public school with bitterness, but wistfully.
"At Thurgood Marshall," according to a big wall-poster in the lobby of the school, "the dream is alive." But school assignment practices and federal court decisions that have countermanded long-established policies that previously fostered integration in Seattle's schools make the realization of the dream identified with Justice Marshall all but unattainable today.