My first impression on Shame of the Nation

I'm digging into Shame of the Nation and will hopefully be able to post a follow up to this, as well as start conversing with the other readers, very soon. For right now, I'm overdue on some initial impressions.

My first impression, to be honest, was that of being a bit overwhelmed by all of the individual school statistics that Kozal tosses out. Over and over and over he tells us of schools with nearly one hundred percent black and hispanic populations, in cities all over the country, in all kinds of neighborhoods. At first, they start to run together, but then they start to come into focus as a nationwide epidemic of segregation. And then you can start seeing the patterns.

Kozal frames a lot of this in opposition to the Brown v. Board decision which, effectively, ended segregation in our public schools. But the patterns today show differently. And the impression I get from Kozal so far, which I'm interested to see how it pans out through the rest of the book, is that the current problems with segregation in schools is a new type of problem from what B v. B addressed: some sort of impersonal, unconscious, systematic issue. That, perhaps more problematic than explicit racism or even the 'separate but equal' treatment of Plessy v. Ferguson, is trusting that the issue does not exist anymore and 'letting the market decide,' as it were.

Kozal's intimate tone throughout gives the book a nice, personal feel. He relates his prior experiences as a teacher in poor, mostly minority schools and throughout he provides anecdotes about the children he has encountered and spoken with throughout his research. He strikes a nice balance between observation and research that, so far, makes for a good read, although I can already feel myself looking for deeper analysis and, to be frank, someone to blame and a ready solution. I suppose the first person narration confuses part of me into looking for Kozal's narrative of 'how I overcame the issue,' even though I know it's not going to be there.

What I am looking forward to is how Kozal further sorts out the complexity of the segregation issue and, hopefully, provides a framework for understanding that can be used by those of us looking to transform our 'best intentions' into 'meaningful action.'