The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America was published by Crown Publishers in 2005, and its subtitle is not hyperbole: Kozol documents, through visits to sixty schools in eleven states, the systematic resegregation of American public education that occurred between 1990 and 2005 — the reversal of every integration gain achieved between Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the late 1980s.
The statistics are stark: by 2005, most Black and Latino students attended schools where 70–100% of their classmates were also students of color. In many urban districts, schools were more segregated than they had been before the civil rights movement. And the funding gap documented in Savage Inequalities had not narrowed — in many cases it had widened.
But the book’s most disturbing observation is about language. The schools Kozol visits have adopted a vocabulary — “standards,” “accountability,” “data-driven instruction,” “zero tolerance” — that replaces the civil rights era’s language of equality and justice. Children in segregated schools are subjected to scripted curricula, behavior management systems that resemble prison discipline, and a test-focused pedagogy that strips education of joy, creativity, and intellectual freedom. The language of reform has become the instrument of control.
Kozol finds the same children he met in 1967 — different faces, same conditions, same systematic deprivation — and his rage at the betrayal of the promise of Brown is barely contained by his prose.
Collecting The Shame of the Nation
First edition (Crown Publishers, New York, 2005): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$20
- Signed first edition: $20–$50