Kozol combines a deft analysis of the legal and political reality of American education with poignant anecdotes about individuals, both children struggling to learn and educators struggling to teach, to demonstrate the impact of what he calls a restoration of apartheid in American schools. Kozol’s critique of the idea of diversity, which typically has come to mean schools without white students, is all the more ironic when one considers the heroes these schools are so often named after: Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall.
What is perhaps most important about this book is Kozol’s discussion of the solutions that have been offered for inner city schools. Rather than requiring equal funding (proponents are fighting for adequacy now) or building infrastructure to improve the quality of education, school districts have begun to turn to the kinds of programs that would never be permitted in integrated, suburban schools. These programs, built around discipline, routine, and rote memory, offer short term gains for the current testing regime, but little in the way of authentic education.
Unfortunately for the kids that Kozol writes so passionately about, solving America’s inner city schools will require complex, expensive, sustained solutions–not exactly qualities likely to be supported in the current political and economic climate.
