Max's Blog on Jonathan Kozol's the Shame of the Nation

I am glad your back for week 4. Before I discuss this week’s reading in Shame of the Nation, I wanted to return for just a minute to my discussion last week of Lean On Me. In the portion of the book I discussed in week 3, Kozol had not mentioned Joe Clark, the principal that is profiled in the movie. One portion of this week’s reading discussed the tendency to think that superhero administrators can come in and fix a broken school and Kozol mentioned Clark (199-200). As I suspected, Kozol was no fan of Clark. He leveled some of the same criticisms at Clark that I discussed last week and generally criticized Clark for letting his ego get ahead of making real change to the high school. Kozol also confirmed my suspicion that after Clark left, the school returned to its bad state because Clark had not actually made any long-lasting changes through his harsh discipline. (200). This week Kozol turned his attention to potential solutions to the school segregation problem. He discussed failed ...

Welcome to the third installment of Max’s Blog on Shame of the Nation. In this week’s chapters, Jonathan Kozol goes deep into the middle and high schools and shows how the problems for students in inner cities get worse as the students progress through the system. He talks about the fights, dilapidated infrastructure, and lunchtime, which is referred to by some interviewed in the book as “Lunchroom Hell.” He presents all of that against the background of intense discipline and looming state tests.  In my house, my parents sometimes pull up a movie from the 1980s or1990s that they think that my brother and I would like (e.g., Hoosiers, Dead Poet’s Society, Breakfast Club). Kozol’s chapter about life in an inner-city high school made me think of one of these movies, Lean On Me . But, as I will explain, it made me think of the movie in a different light than when I first watched it. Lean On Me takes place in Patterson, New Jersey at East Side High, a once-great school that had fa...

          In Chapters 3 through 5 of the Shame of the Nation , Kozol takes on various practices that exist in inner-city schools.  In Chapter 3, he describes a model in which every action by students is scored and provided a label. In Chapter 4, he highlights curriculums that focus on leading to employment at the end of schooling, and in Chapter 5, he focuses on the use of standardized tests to measure performance.  The overall point in these three chapters is that these educational models have the effect of taking the creativity out of the classroom by making education rote and not encouraging free thinking. Kozol is persuasive in these chapters in making the reader believe that these approaches to teaching and managing schools are misguided and have harmful effects on minority children.  He uses examples from his own observation of teachers and anecdotes from students to show the negative effect that some of these techniques have had on s...

Blog Post #1 While I am only a short-way into The Shame Of The Nation by Jonathan Kozol, he already has my blood boiling about the unfairness of the American public school system to people of color. The thesis presented is that, despite the promise of Brown v. Board of Education that American schools must be desegregated, segregation, in fact, remains entrenched and schools serving minority students are substantially behind schools that serve primarily white students. Kozol was effective in the first few chapters in drawing me into his argument by his rhetorical choices. He skillfully combines the use of emotion (pathos), facts and observations (logos), and his own personal experience (ethos) to move the reader to his point of view. I particularly found his powerful but sparing use of stories about individual children as an outstanding use of pathos. Kozol began significant arguments in the book with stories about real children. These stories drew me emotionally into the argument t...