"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Friday, December 02, 2005

Kozol on Ending Apartheid Schooling in America

This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051219/kozol

Overcoming Apartheid
by JONATHAN KOZOL
[from the December 19, 2005 issue]
Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States. Hypersegregated inner-city schools--in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000--are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

"At the beginning of the twenty-first century," according to Gary Orfield and his colleagues at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, "American public schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous resegregation. The desegregation of black students, which increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has receded to levels not seen in three decades." The proportion of black students in majority-white schools stands at "a level lower than in any year since 1968." The four most segregated states for black students, according to a recent study by the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois and California. In New York, only one black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.

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2 comments:

  1. Culture and economics have strangely been used to create this apartheid education which is explained well in Kozol's
    Savage Inequalities.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Got to laugh - this is too much.

    I'm studying for my GEO test on Africa - the professor is using a McGraw Hill textbook.

    Here's an example of MH's take on things:

    "The slave trade and the arrogance of the external powers brought undeserved low expectations of African abilities."

    Surprised they didn't follow up with the sentence, that's why we have NCLB -- so we can fix the soft bigotry of low expectations that has oppressed African Americans for centuries.

    LOL

    ReplyDelete