The Shame of the Nation

Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, Kozol visited public schools across America and found them more segregated than they were in 1954 — not by law but by geography, by funding formulas, by the quiet mechanisms of a society that decided integration was too inconvenient to complete. He sat in kindergarten classrooms in the South Bronx where children were being drilled in rote responses and walked through corridors peeling with mold. He sat in suburban classrooms an hour away where children had swimming pools and pottery studios. The same country. The same constitutional guarantee. Kozol had been documenting this for forty years — Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities — and this is his most complete reckoning. The grief in it is enormous and earned. The most important book about American educational inequality ever written.