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STILL SEPARATE,
STILL UNEQUAL
America's educational apartheid
By Jonathan Kozol
Many Americans who live far from our cent of the student population were black or His-
major cities and who have no firsthand knowledge panic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 per-
of the realities to be found in urban public schools cent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96
seem to have the rather vague and general percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York
impression that City, nearly three
the great extremes quarters of the stu-
of racial isolation dents ~ere black
that were matters or Hispanic.
of grave national Even these sta-
significance some tistics, as stark as
thirty-five or forty they are, cannot
years ago have begin to convey
gradually but how deeply isolat-
steadily dimin- ed children in the
ished in more re- poorest and most
cent years. The segregatedsections
truth, unhappily, . of these cities have
is that the trend, become. In the
for well over a typically colossal
decade now, has high schools of the
been precisely the reverse. Schools that were al- Bronx, for instance, more than 90 percent of
ready deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years students (in most cases, more than 95 percent)
ago are no less segregated now, while, thousands are black or Hispanic. At John F. Kennedy High
of other schools around the country that had School in 2003, 93 percent of the enrollment of
been integrated either voluntarily or by the force more than 4,000 students were black and His-
of law have since been rapidly resegregating. panic; only 3.5 percent of students at the school
In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, were white. At Harry S. Truman High School,
87 percent of public-school enrollment was black black and Hispanic students represented 96 per-
or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in cent of the enrollment of 2,700 students; 2 per-
the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., cent were white. At Adlai Stevenson High
94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less School, which enrolls 3,400 students, blacks and
than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 per- Hispanics made up 97 percent of the student
lonathan Kozol is the author of many books, includingSavage Inequalities and Amazing Grace.
This article was IUlaptedfrom The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America,
to be published this month by Crown.
A
ne of the most disheartening experiences
for those who grew up in the years when Martin
In New York City there is a primary school
named for Langston Hughes (99 percent black
and Hispanic), a middle school named for Jack-
Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were alive ie Robinson (96 percent black and Hispanic),
is to visit public schools today that bear their and a high school named for Fannie Lou Hamer,
names, or names of one of the great heroes of the integration move-
other honored lead- ment in the South, in which 98 percent of stu-
THE WORD "DIVERSE" HAS BECOME ers of the integration dents are black or Hispanic. In Harlem there is
struggles that pro- yet another segregatedThurgood Marshall School
A EUPHEMISM FOR A MUCH duced the temporary (also 98 percent black and Hispanic), and in the
progress that took South Bronx dozens of children I have known
PLAINER WORD THAT HAS BECOME
place in the three went to a segregated middle school named in
UNSPEAKABLE decades after Brown honor of Paul Robeson in which less than half of
v. Board of Education, one percent of the enrollment was Caucasian.
and to fmdout how There is a well-known high school named for
many of these schools are bastions of contempo- Martin Luther King Jr. in New York City too.
rary segregation. It is even more disheartening This school, which I've visited repeatedly in re-
when schools like these are not in deeply segre- cent years, is located in an upper-middle-class
gated inner-city neighborhoods but in racially white neighborhood, where it was built in the
mixed areas where the integration of a public belief-or hope-that it would draw large num-
school would seem to be most natural, and where, bers of white students by permitting them to walk
indeed, it takes a conscious effort on the part of to school, while only their black and Hispanic
parents or school officials in these districts to classmates would be asked to ride the bus or come
avoid the integration option that is often right at by train. When the school was opened in 1975,
their front door. - less than a block from Lincoln Center in Man-
In a Seattle neighborhood that I visited in hattan, "it was seen," according to the New York
2002, for instance, where approximately half the Times, "as a promising effort to integrate white,
families were Caucasian, 95 percent of students at black and Hispanic students in a thriving neigh-
the Thurgood Marshall Elementary School were borhood that held one of the city's cultural gems."
black, Hispanic, Native American, or of Asian ori- Even from the start, however, parents in the
gin. An African-American teacher at the school neighborhood showed great reluctance to per-
told me-not with bitterness but wistfully-of mit their children to enroll at Martin Luther
seeing clusters of white parents and their chil- King, and, despite "its prime location and its
dren each morning on the comer of a street close name, which itself creates the highest of expec-
to the school, waiting for a bus that took the chil- tations," notes the Times, the school before long
dren to a predominantly white school. came to be a destination for black and Hispanic
"At Thurgood Marshall," according to a big students who could not obtain admission into
wall poster in the school's lobby, "the dream is more successful schools. It stands today as one of
alive." But school-assignment practices and fed- the nation's most visible and problematic symbols
of an expectation rapidly receding and
eral court decisions that have countermanded
long-established policies that previously fostered
integration in Seattle's schools make the real-
n a legacy substantially betrayed.
ization of the dream identified with Justice Mar- Lrhaps most damaging to any serious effort to
shall all but unattainable today. In San Diego address racial segregation openly is the refusal of
there is a school that bears the name of Rosa most of the major arbiters of culture in our north-
Parks in which 86 percent of students are black ern cities to confront or even clearly name an
and Hispanic and only some 2 percent are white. obvious reality they would have castigated with a
In Los Angeles there is a school that bears the passionate determination in another section of
name of Dr. King that is 99 percent black and His- the nation fifty years before-and which, more-
REPORT 43
And some who are perhaps most realistic do not or leave it as it was. My visit to her class, however,
even dare to ask for, or expect, complete equali- proved to be so pleasant, and the children seemed
ty, which seems beyond the realm of probability so eager to bombard me with their questions
for many years to come, but look instead for about where I lived, and why I lived there rather
only a sufficiency of means-"adequacy" is the than in New York, and who I lived with, and
legal term most often used today-by which to win how many dogs I had, and other interesting ques-
those practical and finite victories that appear to tions of that sort, that I decided not to interrupt
be within their reach. Higher standards, higher ex- the nice reception they had given me with ques-
pectations, are repeatedly demanded of these ur- tions about usages and spelling. I left "the whole
ban principals, and of the teachers and students why world" to float around unedited and unrevised
in their schools, but far lower standards-s-eer- in my mind. The letter itself soon found a rest-
tainly in ethical respects-appear to be expected ing place on the wall above my desk.
vast and seemingly abstract as having more, or ~here are expensive children and there are
having less, or not having at all? cheap children," writes Marina Warner, an es-
Around the time I met Alliyah in the school sayist and novelist who has written many books
year 1997-1998, New York's Board of Education for children, "just as there are expensive women
spent about $8,000 yearly on the education of a and cheap women." The governmentally ad-
third-grade child in a New YorkCity public school. ministered diminishment in value of the chil-
If you could have scooped Alliyah up out of the dren of the poor begins even before the age of five
neighborhood where she wasborn and plunked her or six, when they begin their years of formal ed-
down in a fairly typical white suburb of New York, ucation in the public schools. It starts during
REPORT 45
their infant and toddler years, when hundreds of very modest early-learning skills as knowing how
thousands of children of the very poor in much to hold a crayon or a pencil, identify perhaps a
of the United States are locked out of the op- couple of shapes and colors, or recognize that
portunity for preschool education for no reason printed pages go from left to right.
but the accident of birth and budgetary choices Three years later, in third grade, these children
of the government, while children of the privi- are introduced to what are known as "high-stakes
leged are often given veritable feasts of rich de- tests," which in many urban systems now deter-
velopmental early education. mine whether students can or cannot be pro-
In New York City, for example, affluent parents moted. Children who have been in programs like
pay surprisingly large sums of money to enroll those offered by the "Baby Ivies" since the age of
their.youngsters, beginning at the age of two or two have, by now, received the benefits of six or
three, in extraordinary early-education programs seven years of education, nearly twice as many as
that give them social competence and rudimen- the children who have been denied these op-
tary pedagogic skills unknown to children of the portunities; yet all are required to take, and will
same age in the city's poorer neighborhoods. The be measured by, the same examinations. Which
most exclusive of the private preschools in New of these children will receive the highest scores?
York, which are The ones who spent the years from two to four in
known to those who lovely little Montessori programs and in other
MANy PEOPLE SEEM TO BE can afford them as pastel-painted settings in which tender and at-
"Baby Ivies," cost as tentive and well-trained instructors read to them
ATTRACTED TO THE ARGUMENT much as $24,000 for from beautiful storybooks and introduced them
a full-day program. very gently for the first time to the world of num-
THAT MONEY MAY NOT MATTER
Competition for ad- bers and the shapes of letters, and the sizes and
MUCH AT ALL mission to these pre- varieties of solid objects, and perhaps taught them
K schools is so ex- to sort things into groups or to arrange them in
treme that private a sequence, or to do those many other interest-
counselors are frequently retained, at fees as high ing things that early childhood specialists refer to
as $300 an hour, to guide the parents through the as pre-numeracy skills? Or the ones who spent
application process. those years at home in front of a TV or sitting by
At the opposite extreme along the economic the window of a slum apartment gazing down
spectrum in New York are thousands of children into the street? There is something deeply hyp-
who receive no preschool opportunity at all. Ex- ocritical about a society that holds an eight-year-
actly how many thousands are denied this op- old inner-city child "accountable" for her per-
portunity in New York City and in other major formance on a high-stakes standardized exam but
cities is almost impossible to know. Numbers that does not hold the high officialsof our government
originate in governmental agencies in many states accountable for robbing her of what they
are incomplete and imprecise and do not always gave their own kids six or seven
differentiate with clarity between authentic pre-
K programs that have educative and develop-
n years earlier.
mental substance and those less expensive child- Lrhaps in order to deflect these recognitions,
care arrangements that do not. But even where or to soften them somewhat, many people, even
states do compile numbers that refer specifically while they do not doubt the benefit of making
to educative preschool programs, it is difficult to very large investments in the education of their
know how many of the children who are served own children, somehow-paradoxical as it may
are of low income, since admissionsto some of the seem-appear to be attracted to the argument
state-supported programs aren't determined by that money may not really matter that much at all.
low income or they are determined by a compli- No matter with what regularity such doubts about
cated set of factors of which poverty is only one. the worth of spending money on a child's educa-
There are remarkable exceptions to this pattern tion are advanced, it is obvious that those who
in some sections of the nation. In Milwaukee, have the money, and who spend it lavishly to
for example, virtually every four-year-old is now benefit their own kids, do not do it for no reason.
enrolled in a preliminary kindergarten program, Yet shockingly large numbers of well-educated
which amounts to a full year of preschool edu- and sophisticated people whom I talk with nowa-
cation, prior to a second kindergarten year for days dismiss such challenges with a surprising
five-year-olds. More commonly in urban neigh- ease. "Is the answer really to throw money into
borhoods, large numbers of low-income children these dysfunctional and failing schools?" I'm often
are denied these opportunities and come into asked. "Don't we have some better ways to make
their kindergarten year without the minimal so- them 'work'?" The question is posed in a variety
cial skills that children need in order to partici- of forms. "Yes,of course, it's not a perfectly fair sys-
pate in class activities and without even such tem as it stands. But money alone is surely not the
REPORT 47
this is the rhythm and didactic certitude one Learning" that was posted in the corridor close to
hears today in inner-city schools that have em- the principal's office, "is driven by curriculum and
braced a pedagogy of direct command and ab- instruction." I didn't know what this expression
solute control. "Taking their inspiration from meant. Like many other undefined and arbitrary
the ideas of B. F. Skinner. .. ,"saysthe Times, pro- phrases posted in the school, it seemed to be a dic-
ponents of scripted rote-and-drill curricula ar-
tum that invited no interrogation.
ticulate their aim as the establishment of "fault- I entered the fourth grade of a teacher I will call
less communication" between "the teacher, who Mr. Endicott, a man in his mid-thirties who had
is the stimulus," and "the students, who respond." arrived here without training as a teacher, one of
The introduction of Skinnerian approaches about a dozen teachers in the building who were
(which are commonly employed in penal insti- sent into this school after a single summer of
tutions and drug-rehabilitation programs), as a short-order preparation. Now in his second year,
way of altering the attitudes and learning styles he had developed a considerable sense of confi-
of black and Hispanic children, is provocative, dence and held the class under a tight control.
and it has stirred some outcries from respected As I found a place to sit in a far comer of the
scholars. To actually go into a school where room, the teacher and his young assistant, who
you know some of the children very, very well was in her first year as a teacher, were beginning
and see the way that these approaches can af- a math lesson about building airport runways, a
fect their daily lives and thinking processes is lesson that provided children with an opportunity
even more provocative. for measuring perimeters. On the wall behind
On a chilly November day four years ago in the the teacher, in large letters, wasWritten:"Portfolio
South Bronx, I entered P.S. 65, ~ school I had Protocols: 1. You are responsible for the selection
of [your] work that enters your portfolio.
2. As your skills become more sophisti-
cated this year, you will want to revise,
amend, supplement, and possibly replace
items in your portfolio to reflect your in-
tellectual growth." On the left side of the
room: "Performance Standards Mathe-
matics Curriculum: M-5 Problem Solving
and Reasoning. M-6 Mathematical Skills
and Tools ... "
My attention was distracted by some
whispering among the children sitting to
the right of me. The teacher's response to
this distraction was immediate: his arm
shot out and up in a diagonal in front of
him, his hand straight up, his fingers flat.
The young co-teacher did this, too. When
they saw their teachers do this, all the
children in the classroom did it, too.
"Zero noise," the teacher said, but this
instruction proved to be unneeded. The
strange salute the class and teachers gave
been visiting since 1993. There had been major each other, which turned out to be one of a num-
changes since I'd been there last.Silent lunches had ber of such silent signals teachers in the school
been instituted in the cafeteria, and on days when were trained to use, and children to obey, had
children misbehaved, silent recesshad been intro- done the job of silencing the class.
duced as well. On those days the students were "Active listening!"saidMr. Endicott. "Heads up!
obliged to sit in rows and maintain perfect silence Tractor beams!" which meant, "Every eye on me."
on the floor of a small indoor room instead of go- On the front wall of the classroom, in hand-
ing out to play. The words SUCCESS FOR ALL, the written words that must have taken Mr. Endicott
brand name of a scriptedcurriculum-better known long hours to transcribe, was a list of terms that
by its acronym, SFA-were prominently posted could be used to praise or criticize a student's work
at the top of the main stairway and, as I would lat- in mathematics. At Level Four, the highest of
er find, in almost every room. Also frequently dis- four levels of success, a child's "problem-solving
played within the halls and classroomswere a num- strategies"could be described,according to this list,
ber of administrative memos that were worded as "systematic, complete, efficient, and possiblyel-
with unusual didactic absoluteness. "Authentic egant," while the student's capability to draw con-
Writing," read a document called "Principles of clusions from the work she had completed could
REPORT 49
quential systemsof instruction, but the longing to state proficiencies. Even with her multi-modal
tum art into science doesn't stop with reading pumpkin, as her faculty adviser told me, she was
methodologies alone. In many schools it now ex- still afraid she would be criticized because she
tends to almost every aspect of the operation of the knew the pumpkin would not really help her chil-
school and of the lives that children lead within dren to-achieve expected goals on state exams.
it. In some schools even such ordinary acts as Why, I asked a group of educators at a semi-
children filing to lunch or recess in the hallways nar in Sacramento, was a teacher being placed in
or the stairwells are subjected to the same deter- a position where she'd need to do preposterous
mined emphasis upon empirical precision. curricular gymnastics to enjoy a bit of seasonal
"Rubric For Filing" is the printed heading of a amusement with her kids on Halloween? How
lengthy list of numbered categories by which much injury to state-determined "purpose" would
teachers are supposed to grade their students on it do to let the children of poor people have a
the way they march along the corridors in another pumpkin party once ayear for no other reason
inner-city district I than because it's something fun that other chil-
have visited. Some- dren get to do on autumn days in public schools
Do KIDS WHO GO TO SCHOOLS one, in this instance,
did a lot of work to
across most of America?
"Forcing an absurdity on teachers does teach
LIKE THESE ENJOY THE DAYSTHEY fit the filing profi- something," said an African-American profes-
ciencies of children sor. "It teaches acquiescence. It breaks down
SPEND IN THEM? IS SCHOOL A
into no more and no the will to thumb your nose at pointless proto-
HAPPY PLACE TO BE? less than thirty-two cols-to call absurdity 'absurd.!" Writing out
specific slots: the standards with the proper numbers on the
"Line leader con- chalkboard has a similar effect, he said; and do-
fidently leads the class.... Line is straight.... Spac- ing this is "terribly important" to the principals
ing is tight. ... The class is stepping together. ... in many of these schools. "You have to post the
Everyone shows pride, their shoulders high ... no standards, and the way you know the children
slumping," according to the strict criteria for fil- know the standards is by asking them to state
ing at Level Four. the standards. And they do it-and you want to
"Line isstraight, but one or two people [are]not be quite certain that they do it if you want to
quite' in line," according to the box for Level keep on working at that school."
Three. "Line leader leads the class," and "almost In speaking of the drill-based program in effect
everyone shows pride." at P.S. 65, Mr. Endicott told me he tended to be
"Several are slumping .... Little pride is show- sympathetic to the school administrators, more so
ing," says the box for Level Two. "Spacing is un- at least than the other teachers I had talked with
even .... Some are talking and whispering." seemed to be. He said he believed his principal
"Line leader is paying no attention," says the had little choice about the implementation of
box for Level One. "Heads are turning every way. this program, which had been mandated for all el-
... Hands are touching .... The line is not straight. ementary schools in New York City that had had
... There is no pride." rock-bottom academic records over a long peri-
The teacher who handed me this document be- od of time, "This puts me into a dilemma," he
lieved at first that it was written as a joke by went on, "because I love the kids at P.S. 65."
someone who had simply come to be fed up with And even while, he said, "I know that my teach-
all the numbers and accounting rituals that clut- ing SFA is a charade ... if I don't do it I won't be
ter up the day in many overregulated schools. permitted to teach these children."
Alas, it turned out that it was no joke but had Mr. Endicott, like all but two of the new re-
been printed in a handbook of instructions for the cruits at P.S. 65-there were about fifteen in
teachers in the city where she taught. all-was a white person, as were the principal
In some inner-city districts, even the most and most of the administrators at the schoo1. As
pleasant and old-fashioned class activities of ele- a result, most of these neophyte instructors had
mentary schools have now been overtaken by had little or no prior contact with the children of
these ordering requirements. A student teacher in an inner-city neighborhood; but, like the others
California, for example, wanted to bring a pump- I met, and despite the distancing between the
kin to her class on Halloween but knew it had no children and their teachers that resulted from
ascertainable connection to the California stan- the scripted method of instruction, he had de-
dards. She therefore had developed what she veloped close attachments to his students and
called "The Multi-Modal Pumpkin Unit" to teach did not want to abandon them. At the same time,
science (seeds), arithmetic (the sizeand shape of the class- and race-specific implementation of
pumpkins, I believe-this detail wasn't clear), this program obviously troubled him. "There's
and certainitems she adapted out of language an expression now," he said. "'The rich get rich-
arts, in order to position "pumpkins" in a frame of er, and the poor get SFA.''' He said he was still
REPORT 51
No matter how many tawdry details like these me that she hoped to be a social worker or a doc-
I've read in legal briefs or depositions through tor but was programmed into "Sewing Class" this
the years, I'm always shocked again to learn how year. She also had to take another course, called
often these unsanitary physical conditions are "Life Skills," which she told me was a very basic
permitted to continue in the schools that serve course-"a retarded class," to use her words-
our poorest students-even after they have been that "teaches things like the six continents,"
vividly described in the media. But hearing of which she said she'd learned in elementary school.
these conditions in Mireya's words waseven more When I asked her why she had to take these
unsettling, in part because this student seemed so courses, she replied that she'd been told they were
fragile and because the need even to speak of required, which as I later learned was not exact-
these indignities in front of me and all the oth- ly so. What was required was that high school
er students was an additional indignity. students take two courses in an area of study called
"The problem is this," she carefully explained. "The Technical Arts," and which the LosAngeles
"You're not allowed to use the bathroom during Board of Education terms "Applied Technology."
lunch, which is a thirty-minute period. The At schools that served the middle class or upper-
only time that you're allowed to use it is between middle class, this requirement was likely to be
your classes." But "this is a huge building," she met by courses that had academic substance and,
went on. "It has long corridors. If you have one perhaps, some relevance to college preparation.
class at one end of the building and your next At Beverly Hills High School, for example, the
classhappens to be way down at the other end, you technical-arts requirement could be fulfilled by
don't have time to use the bathroom and still get taking subjects like residential architecture, the de-
to class before it starts. So you go to your class and signing of commercial structures, broadcast jour-
nalism, advanced computer graphics, a
sophisticated course in furniture design,
carving and sculpture, or an honors course
. in engineering research and design. At
Fremont High, in contrast, this require-
ment was far more often met by courses
that were basically vocational and also
obviously keyed to low-paying levels
of employment.
Mireya, for example, who had plans to
go to college, told me that she had to take
a sewing class last year and now was told
she'd been assigned to take a class in hair-
dressing as well. When I asked her teacher
why Mireya could not skip these subjects
and enroll in classesthat would help her to
pursue her college aspirations, she replied,
"It isn't a question of what students want.
It's what the school may have available. If
all the other elective classesthat a student
wants to take are full, she has to take one
of these classes if she wants to graduate."
then you ask permission from your teacher to go A very small girl named Obie, who had big
to the bathroom and the teacher tells you, 'No. blue-tinted glasses tilted up across her hair, in-
You had your chance between the periods .. .' terrupted then to tell me with a kind of wild gus-
"I feel embarrassed when I have to stand there to that she'd taken hairdressing twice! When I ex-
and explain it to a teacher." pressed surprise that this was possible, she said
"This is the question," said a wiry-looking boy there were two levels of hairdressing offered here
named Edward, leaning forward in his chair. "Stu- at Fremont High. "One is in hairstyling," she
dents are not animals, but even animals need to re- said. "The other is in braiding."
lieve themselves sometimes. We're here for eight Mireya stared hard at this student for a moment
hours. What do they think we're supposed to do?" and then suddenly began to cry. "I don't want to
"It humiliates you," said Mireya, who went on take hairdressing. I did not need sewing either. I
to make the interesting statement that "the school knew how to sew. My mother is a seamstress in
provides solutions that don't actually work," and a factory. I'm trying to go to college. I don't need
this idea was taken up by several other students to sew to go to college. My mother sews. I hoped
in describing course requirements within the for something else."
school. A tall black student, for example, told "What would you rather take?" I asked.
REPORT 53
ident Bush has now proposed, in ninth, tenth, and the highest concentrations of black and His-
eleventh grades as well. panic students tend to be enrolled, less than
The elements of strict accountability, in short, half the entering ninth-graders graduate in four
are solidly in place; and in many states where years. Nationwide, from 1993 to 2002, the
the present federal policies are simply reinforce- number of high schools graduating less than
ments of accountability requirements that were half their ninth-grade class in four years has in-
established long before the passage of the feder- creased by 75 percent. In the 94 percent of dis-
allaw, the same regimen has been in place since tricts in New York State where white children
1995 or even earlier. The "tests-and-standards" make up the majority, nearly 80 percent of stu-
partisans have had things very much their way for dents graduate from high school in four years.
an extended period of time, and those who were In the 6 percent of districts where black and
convinced that they had ascertained "what works" Hispanic students make up the majority, only
in schools that serve minorities and children of 40 percent do so. There are 120 high schools in
the poor have had ample opportunity to prove New York, enrolling nearly 200,000 minority
that they were right. students, where less than 60 percent of entering
What, then, it is reasonable to ask, are the ninth-graders even make it to twelfth grade.
results? The promulgation of new and expanded in-
The achievement gap between black and ventories of "what works," no matter the enthu-
white children, which narrowed for three siasm with which they're elaborated, is not going
decades up until the late years of the 1980s-the to change this. The use of hortatory sloganschant-
period in which school segregation steadily de- ed by the students in our segregated schools is not
creased-started to widen once more in the ear- going to change this. Desperate historical revi-
ly 1990s when the federal courts began the sionism that romanticizes the segregation of an
process of resegregation by dismantling the man- older order (this is a common theme of many
dates of the Brown decision. From that point on, separatists today) is not going to change this.
the gap continued to widen or remained essen- Skinnerian instructional approaches, which de-
tially unchanged; and while recently there has capitate a child's capability for critical reflection,
been a modest narrowing of the gap in reading are not going to change this. Posters about "glob-
scores for fourth-grade children, the gap in sec- al competition" will certainly not change this.
ondary school remains as wide as ever. Turning six-vear-olds into examination soldiers
The media inevitably celebrate the periodic and denying eight-vear-olds their time for play at
upticks that a set of scores may seem to indicate recess will not change this.
in one year or another in achievement levels of . "I went to Washington to challenge the soft
black and Hispanic children in their elementary bigotry of low expectations," said President
schools. But if these upticks were not merely tem- Bush in his 'campaign for reelection in Septem-
porary "testing gains" achieved by test-prep regi- ber 2004. "It's working. It's making a differ-
mens and were instead authentic education gains, ence." Here we have one of those deadly lies
they would carryover into middle school and. that by sheer repetition is at length accepted
high school. Children who know how to read- by surprisingly large numbers of Americans.
and read with comprehension--do not suddenly But it is not the truth; and it is not an inno-
become nonreaders and hopelessly disabled writ- cent misstatement of the facts. It is a devious
ers when they enter secondary school. False gains appeasement of the heartache of the parents of
evaporate; real gains endure. Yet hundreds of the black and brown and poor, and if it is not
thousands of the inner-city children who have forcefully resisted it will lead us further in a
made what many districts claim to be dramatic .very dangerous direction.
gains in elementary school, and whose principals Whether the issue is inequity alone or deepen-
and teachers have adjusted almost every aspect of ing resegregation or the labyrinthine intertwin-
their school days and school calendars, forfeiting ing of the two, it is well past the time for us to start
recess, canceling or cutting back on all the so- the work that it will take to change this. If it takes
called frills (art, music, even social sciences) in or- people marching in the streets and other forms of
der to comply with state demands-those stu- adamant disruption of the governing civilities, if
dents, now in secondary school, are sitting in it takes more than litigation, more than legislation,
subject-matter classes where they cannot com- and much more than resolutions introduced by
prehend the texts and cannot set down their ideas members of Congress, these are prices we should
in the kind of sentences expected of most fourth- . be prepared to pay. "We do not have the things you
and fifth-grade students in the suburbs. Students have," Alliyah told me when she wrote to ask if I
in this painful situation, not surprisingly, tend to would come and visit her school in the South
be most likely to drop out of school. Bronx. "Can you help us?"America owes that lit-
In 48 percent of high schools in the nation's tle girl and millions like her a more honorable an-
100 largest districts, which are those in which swer than they have received. _