Hear JONATHAN KOZOL
acclaimed author of
SAVAGE INEQUALITIES,
on the release of his new book,
THE SHAME OF THE NATION:
THE RESTORATION OF APARTHEID SCHOOLING IN AMERICA
Saturday, September 17, 2005
2-4PM
Blair High School Auditorium
51 University Boulevard, Silver Spring, MD 20901
BOOKS WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE TO BE SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR.
This event is brought to you by the
Center For Teacher Leadership
and co-sponsored by the
Equity in Education Coalition in Montgomery County
Montgomery County Education Association
Progressive Maryland
NAACP Parents Council
Blair Students for Global Responsibility
Montgomery County Education Forum
EXCERPTS:
Many Americans who live far from our major cities and who have no firsthand knowledge of
the realities to be found in urban public schools seem to have the rather vague and general
impression that the great extremes of racial isolation that were matters of grave national
significance some thirty-five or forty years ago have gradually but steadily diminished in more
recent years. The truth, unhappily, is that the trend, for well over a decade now, has been
precisely the reverse. Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years
ago are no less segregated now, while thousands of other schools around the country that had
been integrated either voluntarily or by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating.
* * *
'I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations,' said President Bush in
his campaign for reelection in September 2004. 'It's working. It's making a difference.' Here we
have one of those deadly lies that by sheer repetition is at length accepted by surprisingly large
numbers of Americans. But it is not the truth; and it is not an innocent misstatement of the facts.
It is a devious appeasement of the heartache of the parents of the black and brown and poor,
and if it is not forcefully resisted it will lead us further in a very dangerous direction.
* * *
Whether the issue is inequity alone or deepening resegregation or the labyrinthine intertwining
of the two, it is well past the time for us to start the work that it will take to change this. If it
takes people marching in the streets and other forms of adamant disruption of the governing
civilities, if it takes more than litigation, more than legislation, and much more than resolutions
introduced by members of Congress, these are prices we should be prepared to pay.
* * *
Teachers and principals should not permit the beautiful profession they have chosen to be
redefined by those who know far less than they about the hearts of children. When they do this,
as in schools in which the principals adopt the borrowed lexicons of building managers or
CEOs, they come out sounding inauthentic, self-diminished, and they end up diminishing the
human qualities of teachers. Schools can probably survive quite well without their rubric charts
and numbered standards-listings plastering the walls. They can't survive without good teachers
and, no matter what curriculum may be in place, whether its approved by state officials or by
Washington or not, they are no good at all if teachers are unable to enjoy the work they do and
be invigorated by its unpredictables.
* * *
'ALL CHILDREN CAN LEARN' the advocates for the agenda say hypnotically, as if the tireless
reiteration of this slogan could deliver to low -income children the same clean and decent
infrastructure and amplitude of cultural provision by experienced instructors that we give the
children of the privileged.
* * *
'There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education. There ought to be; we measure
almost everything else that happens to them in their schools. Do kids who go to schools like
these enjoy the days they spend in them? Is school, for most of them, a happy place to be? You
do not find the answers to these questions in reports about achievement levels, scientific
methods of accountability, or structural revisions in the modes of governance.
