Missed opportunities.(Book Review)

Jonathan Kozol The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Crown, 388 pages, $25

Early in this survey of inequities in the public school system, Jonathan Kozol reveals why he went into the field of education. It was not a love of math and science, a desire to implant cultural legacies in young minds, or an interest in child development. It was the murder of three civil rights volunteers in Mississippi in 1964. When the news broke, Kozol dropped out of graduate school, drove to a black neighborhood in Boston, and "signed up to be a reading teacher in a freedom school."

Forty years later, the fervor of that commitment and the injustice at its root suffuse every page of The Shame of the Nation. For decades, Kozol has toured inner-city schools, interviewed students, teachers, and administrators, and recorded his impressions in acclaimed books. In this one, too, we read about crumbling facilities, rat-infested classrooms, dangerous schoolyards, demoralized instructors, and principals harassed to produce better results. Sixth-graders send him letters pleading, "I wish that this school was the most beautiful school in the whole why [sic] world,' Sophomores and juniors rue the dead-end routine of their school day, then weep. Teachers whisper to him how much they loathe the pedagogy they must practice.

A simple description of these conditions is enough to rouse the blood. But Kozol has a larger aim. There is a distressing factor in the catastrophe: these schools are populated almost entirely by black and Hispanic students. In fact, the segregation of white and minority students is as widespread today as it was just after the Civic Rights Act passed, and the trend is worsening. To Kozol, "it is the same old ballgame" as the Jim Crow South, with Hispanics and poor Asians added to the oppressed. We are witnessing "the restoration of apartheid."

This is a severe accusation with a heavy burden of proof. Apartheid isn't just an upsurge of racist episodes--it is a system. And if one proposes a "restoration" in process, then a fact-filled legal, demographic, and economic investigation should follow.

You won't find it in this book, though. For all its 388 pages, The Shame of the Nation has little in-depth analysis. Kozol provides numbers on per-student funding, he mentions legal decisions, and he describes urban school curricula. He lets children and teachers speak, and he cites education stories from The New York Times. But he doesn't explain the why or the how of funding discrepancies, deteriorating buildings, and low achievement. Kozol presents his chapters as if they were an expose of school conditions, but it is easy to portray those conditions. Last year I observed music classes in a D.C. elementary school and noted the same dingy corridors, rusty chain link fences, and a lockdown atmosphere. The disturbing signs make for poignant prose, but they render a deeper inquiry all the more necessary.

Why not dig further? Because Kozol already knows the cause of today's apartheid: a long-term, thinly concealed conspiracy of whites to keep black and brown kids away from their own. Parent groups, conservative reformers, and compliant politicians cast minority children into walled-off schools whose decrepit habitat and drill-and-kill teaching brutalize them into acquiescence. As Kozol puts it, "young middle-class white families have successfully been pressuring their school boards to carve out almost entirely separate provinces of education."