September 12, 2005
Public school resegregation is a "national horror hidden in plain view," writes former educator turned public education activist Kozol (Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace). Kozol visited 60 schools in 11 states over a five-year period and finds, despite the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, many schools serving black and Hispanic children are spiraling backward to the pre-Brown era. These schools lack the basics: clean classrooms, hallways and restrooms; up-to-date books in good condition; and appropriate laboratory supplies. Teachers and administrators eschew creative coursework for rote learning to meet testing and accountability mandates, thereby "embracing a pedagogy of direct command and absolute control" usually found in "penal institutions and drug rehabilitation programs." As always, Kozol presents sharp and poignant portraits of the indignities vulnerable individuals endure. "You have all the things and we do not have all the things," one eight-year-old Bronx boy wrote the author. In another revealing exchange, a cynical high school student tells his classmate, a young woman with college ambitions who was forced into hair braiding and sewing classes, "You're ghetto-so you sew." Kozol discovers widespread acceptance for the notion that "schools in ghettoized communities must settle for a different set of academic and career goals" than schools serving middle-and upper-class children. Kozol tempers this gloom with hopeful interactions between energetic teachers and receptive children in schools where all is not lost. But these "treasured places" don't hide the fact, Kozol argues, that school segregation is still the rule for poor minorities, or that Kozol, and the like-minded politicians, educators and advocates he seeks out, believe a new civil rights movement will be necessary to eradicate it.
October 15, 2005
Kozol, author of the classic and prize-winning "Death at an Early Age", about a year teaching in the Boston public schools, may be excused for thinking that, when it comes to the prospects of urban public education, the world he knows is regressing. For over 40 years, he has documented with depressing clarity the failure of both court-ordered and voluntary desegregation plans to achieve racial balance in our largest cities' schools. The devastating results of these failures are documented here in a work presenting impressions gathered during Kozol's visits to 60 schools in 11 states over the past five years. The details read like something predating the 1954 "Brown" v. "Board of Education" Supreme Court decision: schools woefully underequipped, with enrollment of African American and Hispanic students reaching 80 to 99.5 percent of total students. Kozol is not sanguine about our collective willingness to combat this resegregation. The book's epilog lays much of the blame on the Bush administration's doorstep. Federal -No Child Left Behind - legislation has forced many cash-strapped districts to divert scarce resources to do little more than prepare students for mandated annual standardized testing. Libraries may also want to consider Stephen J. Caldass and Carl L. Bankston's "Forced To Fail: The Paradox of School Desegregation", where Kozol's findings though not his solutions are echoed.
In her first book, Carter (sociology, Harvard Univ.), sees the issue of minority student performance as less a function of a school's racial composition than the result of each student's choices concerning his or her degree of acceptance of WASP culture. Based on interviews conducted with African American and Latino high school students from low-income families in Yonkers, NY, she concludes that students who perform best are those who can adapt to what is considered the dominant culture without assimilating (Carter calls them -multicultural navigators -), as opposed to those who actively resist what they perceive as -acting white. - These titles, taken together, reveal juxtapositions of approach between top-down macro-planning and individual preference, for instance, and between national and local perspectives. In tandem, they provide a more nuanced consideration of race in public schools than either provides alone. Recommended for academic and public libraries." -Ari Sigal, Catawba Valley Comm. Coll., Hickory, NC"
Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
August 1, 2005
Respected author Kozol delivers a scathing indictment of public education and the public policy that preserves inequities along race and class lines--producing, in effect, an apartheid educational system. Drawing on his experiences as a teacher in the 1960s and his 40 years spent working with children in inner-city schools, Kozol has a masterful overview of the public school system. For this book, he visited 60 schools in 30 districts in 11 states over a five-year period, gaining access to students and their teachers and parents, penetrating their thoughts, feelings, and circumstances. Within public school systems, wealthy parents have carved out niches of privilege for their children, pouring in funds to support supplemental programs in schools that are predominantly white. In contrast, schools populated by minority and low-income children suffer appalling physical conditions, inexperienced teachers, inadequate resources, and a curriculum so obsessed with accountability and behavior control that it takes the heart and soul out of teaching and learning. Kozol examines the nation's long and troubled history of relegating minority students to the worst schools and the disheartening and growing influence of American business on these schools, which slot children to training for low-status jobs and careers. Lamenting that the nation has given up on integration without ever having tried it, Kozol advocates another civil rights movement to reenergize the struggle for desegregation. Readers interested in public education will appreciate--and be challenged by--this compelling book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)