The Shame Of The Nation Summary

Barbara E Naranjo

Dr. Krystal Beamon

Sociology 4341

2 October 2014

The Shame of the Nation

The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol is a book about the education system in our country. In this book, I learned that there are schools that don’t have the essential resources to provide each student with books or chairs. In his book, Kozol educates the reader as to the health of our public school system. In our public schools, American children are not offered the same opportunities to a good education; our schools are highly segregated between privileged kids and minorities, and our public schools prioritize state tests as more important than the well being of the child.

A good education has a price; the price is higher property tax and a great

I was raised in Cuba with a similar system like the Skinnerian method, but like Kozol mentioned Cuban kids were allowed to interact with the teachers. I knew that Cuba had the best education in Latin America, but in my mind I had no doubt that the United States had the best education in the world. My mentality soon changed. At the age of 11 I came to the United States and that’s when I familiarize myself with the American teaching technique. On my first day of school I noticed that the majority of the kids were behind in almost every subject. With the help of my teachers I was able to understand and speak the English language within a year, but every time the state test came they would put me in ESL classes for that week, because my teachers did not wanted to risk their performance percentage. In these ESL classes I had the worst education experience. Most of the kids where Mexicans a few Europeans, and two Panamanians, together we spoke different languages and the teacher spent the whole week teaching us how to say, “I need to go the bathroom”. In her class there was no need to teach reading, writing, history

Consequence to this was that only 1% of the kids that qualified to transferred were able to transfer to a better school.

Another example of segregation and inequality is the mini documentary trading schools showed by Oprah; we see the huge disadvantages and advantages from two different high schools from Chicago, which are only 30 miles away from each other. Harper the low-income school was a complete disaster compared to the higher income school. Watching this video all I could think about was “Why?” Why are we doing this? The inequalities from these two schools are not only shocking but also extremely sad. Like Kozol said a segregated education in

America is unacceptable. “This nations needs to be a family, and a family sits down for its dinner at a table, and we all deserve a place together at the table. And our children deserve to have a place together in their schools and classrooms, and they need to have that opportunity while they’re still children, while they’re in those years of innocence”(Kozol, 316). Because of those reasons and many more we have the same segregation in our schools today as we did 30 years ago. Naranjo 5

I remember going to Fulmore middle school in Austin TX, the first thing I noticed was