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COPYRIGHT 2005 President and Fellows of Harvard College, through the John F. Kennedy School of Government
Jonathan Kozol, a well-known education and social justice advocate, examines apartheid schooling in his new book The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Some consider this new book to be a continuation of his earlier writings that include Death at an Early Age and Savage Inequalities due to their common theme of shedding light on the education of inner-city public school students. In The Shame of the Nation, Kozol examines public education as apartheid in terms of race and socioeconomic class. The book concludes that the public education being offered at American inner-city schools, serving mostly minority and low-income students, is unjust, unequal and inadequate.
The premise of The Shame of the Nation is to examine how far public education in the United States has come since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed racial segregation in public schools. The Brown v. Board justices ruled that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal and that segregation of children in public schools based solely on race deprived minority children of equal educational opportunities. As quoted in Kozol's book (260), Brown v. Board decided that "In the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place" and in doing so overturned the Court's earlier 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that allowed racial segregation under separate but equal facilities. In The Shame of the Nation, Kozol takes readers on a journey that ultimately...
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