The Shame of the Nation

The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol is one of those books that really opens your eyes to what it is really like outside the Luther bubble and away from ideals and how things should be. His book explores apartheid schooling in the United States today and the resegregation that is happening in many inner-city schools. This book really went along with the movie Freedom Writers and both make me feel as though I would like to teach in an inner-cit school for a little while.
Some of what Kozol wrote was shocking and both frustrated and angered me. He talked about how students are packed into buildings that haven't been renovated in over 30 years and are not able to accommodate the hundreds of extra students that attend classes in them. He writes about rats in classrooms and teachers trying to teach in closets or foyers. He described lunch shifts that started at 9:30 and went until two, and the children waiting in lines for over a 1/2 hour before they even got to the lunch line.
He also writes about the curriculum that are used in some of these schools. Like in Freedom Writers the students are not given actual books but workbooks for subjects like math and reading. There are, of course, standards that the teachers must meet and follow if they want to keep their jobs. The most shocking part of this book was when Kozol talked about rubrics and the language used in the classroom. The language reflected the standards and rote-and-drill curriculum that the teachers had to use. The students were labeled as Level 1s, 2s, 3s, or 4s - 4 being the highest level, one being rock bottom. In one school a principal had the children stand up according to what level they were. He did not even have the Level Ones stand up, it was as if they didn't exist. Then on top of that, the children start picking up on this language and use it to refer to each other. Other words like "Meaningful Sentences" or "Word mastery" are also use, and the students do not know what the words mean, like "mastery" or "meaningful, outside the context that they are used in school. "Word Mastery" is the number of words you can learn in five days or when you get a 100, explained 2 students to Kozol. That is just sad. And the rubrics! One school had a Rubric for Filing - for making a line! For goodness sake! Teachers have better things to do than to make sure that their students are Level Four filers and that they are showing pride as they file from place to place. I would like to know how they expect these children to have pride when they are in buildings that should be condemned, are crowded 30 or more to a classroom, and are not given proper materials to work with.
I feel that this book, or one very like it, is one that all Education Majors should read, but not be forced to read. It is after all like 300 and some pages. As perspective teachers we need to be aware of what is going on in our schools, why it is going on, and what we can do to change it.