AN END TO INEQUALITY

A celebrated educational thinker takes stock of segregation in American schools.

Kozol, a former public school teacher, has been writing about America’s educational system for more than five decades, and he’s the author of such classics as the National Book Award–winning Death at an Early Age and Savage Inequalities. Although Brown v. Board of Education theoretically ended segregation, the author points out that the practice “continues unabated and is presently at its highest level since the early 1990s.” Students who attend predominantly Black and Latine schools must contend with a host of unnecessary disciplinary tactics, including being forbidden to ask questions in class, getting sent to “isolation rooms” for minor infractions, and even getting arrested at ages as young as 6. None of these tactics, writes Kozol, affect their white peers. The culture of these schools isn’t the only problem: Many of their buildings are bastions of “squalor and decrepitude,” with unusable bathrooms and shockingly dangerous levels of lead exposure. Ever since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, schools serving Black and brown students have tended to prioritize testing over content. This is particularly true in language arts, where districts eschew novels for bite-sized passages and ban books that “foster critical thinking or address the conflicts that divide us, based on gender, class, and race.” Citing the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones, as well as his own experience teaching for a school integration program, Kozol convincingly argues that integration is the only way to address “the achievement gap between Black and white students.” The book thoroughly displays the author’s eloquence, conviction, expertise, and attention to detail. Most impressive is Kozol’s ability to draw connections among disparate events to illustrate the underlying systems driving the nation’s greatest inequities.

An inspired and insightful analysis of race-based challenges in the American school system.