Separate and unequal

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. By Jonathan Kozol. Three Rivers Press, 432 pp., $14.95 paperback.

Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education. By Peter Sacks. University of California Press, 388 pp., $24.95.

JONATHAN KOZOL has made a career of documenting in book after heartbreaking book what poor children of color are asked to endure in school. "The massive desolation of the intellect and spirits and the human futures of these millions of young people in their neighborhoods of poverty" is a "national horror hidden in plain view," Kozol writes, quoting Roger Wilkins. Why, then, is there no national response? This is the question that drives Kozol's new book and haunts his readers. Peter Sacks has part of an answer. Transforming public education would require us to debunk one of the most fundamental myths of American culture: the myth of meritocracy.

In The Shame of the Nation, Kozol reveals what school is like for the almost three-fourths of black and Latino students who attend "apartheid schools." Although we use "linguistic sweeteners and semantic somersaults" and call these schools "diverse," the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University (now at UCLA) has documented that more than 2 million students, including more than a quarter of black students in the Northeast and Midwest, attend schools in which 99 to 100 percent of the students are nonwhite. What happens in these schools--with their trash, crumbling buildings, overcrowded classrooms, inexperienced teachers, endless stream of substitutes and a "pedagogy of direct command and absolute control"--does not happen in schools that white students attend; nor would it be tolerated in them.

Kozol chronicles the "new emboldenment among the relatively privileged to isolate their children as completely as they can from more than token numbers of the children of minorities." As an example he points to what happened when New York's state commissioner of education and the New York Board of Regents considered dissolving the Roosevelt school district (described as "New York's Soweto" by an official there) and dispersing its students to surrounding schools. The most virulent opposition came from the predominantly white district of East Meadow, and it looked eerily similar to the resistance of white communities in the South to integration a generation earlier. "Keep Roosevelt Students Out of East Meadow," said a bumper sticker; residents described the children of Roosevelt as "the low-achieving, dysfunctional, criminal bunch ... which the state wants to dump on us." Parents passed out flyers that warned of "rampant violence," "drug sales," "continual assaults" and "widespread pregnancies." "Do you want this brought to East Meadow?" residents were asked.

Kozol visits schools where the policies of No Child Left Behind are being enacted. He reveals that even when "school reform" is presented as universal and "applicable to all," most of the practices are targeted primarily at poor children of color. Kozol brings the reader into several classrooms where teachers have been forced to adopt canned curriculum and disciplinary methods that require almost absolute silence. Students are treated like animals, trained to respond obediently to hand motions, and, like Pavlov's dogs, are offered fake money for correct answers that can be added to the "classroom bank."

Kozol describes a poster in one kindergarten classroom that displayed the names of several retail stores: JC Penney, WalMart, Kmart and Sears. "It's like working in a store," a classroom aide explained. "The children are learning to pretend they're cashiers." Pretending to be a cashier is a wonderful thing if children also pretend to be doctors or teachers or carpenters, but when it is the only career children are encouraged to imagine, it amounts to a severe restriction of possibilities. Kozol's description of the corporate presence in and influence on schools makes one wonder whether the public education system in the United States has become a domestic version of NAFTA: an effective way for companies to guarantee access to a steady supply of cheap, uneducated labor. Forced to read from scripts and to focus all learning on preparing students to take standardized tests, the teachers that Kozol encounters aren't treated much differently than their students. Such teaching not only saps classrooms of joy and spontaneity, Kozol argues, it does violence to children and teachers.

We send most poor students of color to school in collapsing buildings. We ask them to learn in overcrowded classrooms, with no supplies and with unprepared teachers. We spend less money to educate them than we do their white counterparts. And then we have the audacity to ask why they don't perform better on tests. Kozol interviewed a parent from a wealthy school district in Ohio. "We wouldn't play Little League this way," she said, reflecting on the inequalities of education funding in her state. "We'd be embarrassed. We would feel ashamed."