A quick review of The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

Kozol doesn’t explain his role very well, but it seems he is a freelance researcher into minority schools and an apologist for minority student failures. He relies primarily on narrative to try to show that minority schools are underserved by society, but a careful reading just reinforces that minorities are innately ill-equipped to compete in modern society.

Kozol laments the resegregation of schools after a couple of decades of trying to use busing to integrate schools. Integration however failed to improve the academic performance of minorities (Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans). It seems that parents still have an interest in living among people like themselves, and will relocate to communities where their children can go to school with those like them—with a challenging academic program and a safer environment.

For example, even though Chicago is 40% White, 87% of the public school enrollment is Black or Hispanic. In the 1960s and 1970s, desegregation of schools in New York “‘produced lackluster academic results.’” Intelligence is not something that just rubs off one person to another because of proximity. Integration of students with disparate academic capabilities never did reside on any empirical basis for success.

Kozol asks, “Why are the debates about state distribution of resources for our schools so heated, and the opposition to a fairer distribution on the part of wealthy districts so intense, if citizens do not believe that fiscal policies enacted by the government have a decisive role in the determination of the destinies of children?” Actually, there are many reasons. Why should wealthier school districts give their money away voluntarily to minority districts? These people are looking after their own children, and they want them to go to schools that are safe, have a lot of activities available besides purely academic, and of course a good education.

If Kozol wants to allay the fears of wealthier school districts from giving up their perks, maybe he should reveal to them that it is not the wealth of the school district that produces academic achievement, but the innate intelligence of the district’s children that makes them winners. Anyway, this seems to be Kozol’s one of only a few arguments for poor minority performance, in the rest of the book he tells a story that reinforces the hypothesis that minorities fail academically on average because they have lower average IQs than Whites, East Asians, and Ashkenazi Jews.

He makes numerous unfounded statements throughout the book such as, “It is harder to convince young people they ‘can learn’ when they are cordoned off by a society that isn’t sure they really can. That is, I am afraid, one of the most destructive and long-lasting messages a nation possibly could give its children.” Well why wouldn’t the White students feel “cordoned off?” Who tells Blacks they are “cordoned off?” These excuses are meaningless and are just rationales for Black failure. Similar excuses are scattered throughout the book, but there is no coherent or empirical substance to the assertions.

In the rest of the book, he discusses all of the ways that Black students should be doing better on tests but don’t. Ghetto children are entering all-day kindergarten at three and four years of age. When these children go to school, they are pushed into programs that will raise their scores in math and reading. That is, they are drilled endlessly before state tests are given; foregoing gym, art, music, history, science and many other programs.

They put in longer hours to train for the exams, they go to school during the summer so they don’t lose what they have learned during the regular school year, they put in longer days and go to school on Saturdays for months before taking state exams. And when they graduate into the upper grades, they still proceed to fail, and many drop out of school.

He also discusses how some schools cheated on tests, the odd stories of success that fail in a few years, etc. The media then pick up these short success stories, praise them as showing that Blacks can learn, while never reporting on the long-term failure to close the gap between Whites and Blacks.

What we see is what is well known among psychometricians. Young children are more malleable when it comes to learning, and the measured heritability is only about 30 to 40%, which makes some researchers think they can be taught as easily as Whites. As they get older however, heritability increases to about 80% in adulthood and they get discouraged and tend to give up. They increasingly find it hard to learn the lessons given them, blaming those few who do stay in school and are advancing as “acting White.” A careful reading of books like this one have the same themes—no viable reason can be found for Black failure so endless stories are told where White   society is blamed.

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Friday, May 11, 2007 at 05:34 PM in Education
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