Reviewed by Tabitha Thompson

“Before we gave up on integration, we should have tried it,” laments Jonathan Kozol quoting Jack White’s early 1990s essay in Time magazine. Yet while Samuel Alito felt comfortable discussing Brown v. Board of Education in his Supreme Court confirmation hearings because the issue of desegregation is not likely to come before the Court, de facto segregation in America’s urban public schools still exists due to the drawing of district and school lines by neighborhood.

Kozol, who has spent some 40 years in inner city neighborhoods and has traveled the country talking in schools about race issues, focuses his latest book on the monetary and program-related inequities that exist between white suburban middle-class public schools and their urban counterparts, which are often more than 80 percent black and Hispanic.  Kozol successfully weaves his years of interviews with teachers and students into a compelling story about the state of our nation’s disenfranchised youth. It is a single story of need filled with hundreds of thousands of young voices. The reader is engaged by these students who struggle to understand why they are denied what most of us take for granted. 

 “Why is it,” a Hispanic urban high-schooler in California asks of Kozol, “that students who do not need what we need get so much more? And we who need it … get so much less?” Or, as a Bronx third-grader hopefully queries, “What’s it like over there where you live … where other people”—white people—“are …?”

The poorest schools now receive the least funding—lacking certified teachers, updated textbooks, and even enough chairs to sit in. Kozol details dilapidated buildings (from rat infested rooms to window panes falling out from rusted linings), naming children by their grades (“Those girls are Level Three’s, but I’m just a Level Two”), the annexation of recess in order to spend time drilling children to pass standardized exams (so that a school can financially survive Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act), and disheartening blue collar work-focused education programs served up military-style.

White middle-class families would not allow such demoralizing and livelihood-threatening conditions in their children’s schools, Kozol argues, which is why desegregation creates a better learning environment for children of all races. After all, “it’s more difficult to conjure up ‘the other’ when you’re building sand castles together ….”  Kozol’s book helps start the building of those sandcastles by giving those on the outside a view of how far too many of America’s children spent their days.