The Shame of the Nation: An Analysis

The US history has seen to great advances in the area of ending segregation in schools. This has been vividly shown in cases like Brown Versus the Board of Education. Such cases have led to the desegregation in most part of the education system. On the other hand, as Kozol notes, most of the progress that was seen to have been made has become strained and most of the country’s inner schools have returned to the initial state where segregation was the norm. The book by Kozol seeks to identify those schools that have deviated from the common citizen believes is the state of the Schools in the United States.

Chapter four

Chapter four of the text reviews the School to work program as one that is made with racial segregation in mind. While this is never declared, the program is made for the sake of preparing the children of minorities to become better able to get employed. The “industry embedded” education that comes with the program is intended for the children of minorities rather than for everyone. The project is implemented by ensuring that students get their hands at work-like roles within their schools. They are therefore given roles such as coatroom managers, and absence managers which are intended to infuse the students with a work ethic which is intended to help make them better able to become employees (Kozol 93). The program fails to prepare such children for bigger roles in society. This shows a cap on the level of success that children of minority groups are expected to achieve.

Chapter 5: The road to Rome

Kozol (13) notes that the closer to a quarter of a year is spent in preparation and sitting of tests. While this was intended to identify the weakness of the students and help towards their elimination, this never happens. The teachers take too long before they deliver scores to their students (115). The students are then held in those grades through which they did not do well. The time that exists between the time of sitting the exams and the time they receive their scores implies that they may never graduate (117). Moreover, many such schools have eliminated traditional subjects like science, geography and history on the basis that these subjects are not tested (118). Students are further put through an education system without recess. This is especially praised for the sake of ensuring the students are able to attend to those studies that are test-related (120). These measures are all rare or inexistent in the schools of the wealthy and he majorities.

Chapter 6: A hardening of lines

In this chapter, Kozol has reviewed the ever-widening gap between the education systems of the children of the poor and that of the children of the rich. Kozol (135) argues that wealthier parents are able to influence their PTAs to depart from the system of education that is reserved for the less privileged.  Moreover, the school boards have often worked to eradicate certain districts from them, especially if such districts are less privileged. In their place, schools obtain children from those provinces where parents are wealthier even in the cases where they have to leave their own provinces. A good example of this is the Roosevelt School District.

These cases show a lot of departure from the school system that is believed to exist. A majority of children of the minorities are treated differently from their majority counterparts. This disapproves the notion of a system of education where children are treated equally.

Works Cited

Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, New York: Three Rivers Press (2005).