Blog Post #2

        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 students and the morale of teachers.  These chapters left me feeling that these teaching techniques were inflicting more abuse on minority students.

However, while during my reading I was persuaded by Kozol’s arguments, it occurred to me later that his arguments fail to deal effectively with the counterarguments.  The concepts that Kozol focuses on in these chapters (testing, linking school to employment, etc.)  did not drop from the sky. I would think that many smart people worked on and developed these teaching strategies and presumably had reasons for doing so.  Moreover, many school districts have adopted these strategies for their school systems.

In these chapters, Kozol did not appear to make any real effort to interview the people who were behind the strategies that he criticizes.  He does briefly touch on a claim at the end of chapter 3 that the reason for the labeling techniques used in schools is to fight a teacher turnover problem (86-87).  He does not, however, identify his source for that view.  In Chapter 5, he also quotes a leader in the movement for more standardized testing only to show that this person has changed his mind (131-132).  Those were not, in my opinion, sufficient efforts to show the thoughts behind these strategies.

These chapters would have been improved if Kozol interviewed the educators and politicians who developed and adopted these approaches and presented fairly why these people thought that these were good ideas.  He could have then used their comments as a basis to criticize their philosophies.  But as it is now, the reader is presented with a one-sided view with little understanding of what motivated these approaches and why did experts think that they would be successful.

In my first blog post, I credited Kozol for his use of anecdotes to make his points in the first two chapters.  But in those chapters, he was discussing basic segregation and efforts to harm minority students that were obviously unfair.  In these chapters, he used the same approach but applied it to issues that are at least debatable.  Providing more of the debate would have helped me better evaluate his arguments.

Works Cited

Kozol, Jonathan. The Shame of the Nation: the Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Three                    Rivers Press, 2005.