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Final Blog Post - Spencer Burdette

Welcome to my final blog post! In his book Shame of the Nation, author Jonathan Kozol argues that schools servicing minority populations are underfunded and underequipped to adequately educate their students.    Throughout his book, Kozol develops his argument by exploring the inequalities faced by students attending these schools. One of the major points he uses is the disparity in the quality of teaching in inner-city, mostly minority schools. Many times, he points out that the cause of this lack of quality is due to a single focus on preparation for standardized tests. In fact, Kozol describes students that were crying or even wetting themselves because they were so morbidly unprepared for even basic tests. Some of the students couldn't even read the words on the page. A quote that describes the injustice of this all, I felt, hit me particularly hard: “There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountab...
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Blog Post #4 - Relevance The issues that Kozol writes about in Shame of the Nation are not limited just to the Bronx or to the schools he talked about in his book - they are still happening across the nation, right now. One of the most pertinent issues from the book that is relevant to our world right now is the gap between poor students and their more well-off compatriots who can go to different, better schools because their families can afford to live in better areas. A similar thing is happening right now as schools transition to online learning, and poor kids whose families don't have access to broadband internet are being left behind in a phenomenon known as the "digital divide". An article published on March 15th of this year by TIME Magazine explored the digital divide and how it is affecting students as schools are moving towards online learning. More specifically, the article began by focusing on a student at Fort Lewis College named Kyii Sells-Wheeler, a...
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Spencer Burdette - Shame of the Nation Blog Post #3

Spencer Burdette Blog Post #3 - Rhetorical Analysis As I continue to read this book, it has become apparent to me that Kozol has been developing a very distinct style of narrative throughout. In this blog post, I will explore the techniques Kozol uses to do so. One part of Kozol's style is frequently using quotes to bolster his arguments and bring a sense of authenticity to the story he is telling. A particularly effective quote that Kozol uses comes when he describes one of the "themed academies" of East Harlem, and the state of their school: "Supplies were scarce. 'Three of my classes don't have textbooks,' said the principal. 'I have to fight and scratch for everything we get.'"(Kozol 143). Kozol's decision to include this quote invokes the feeling of desperation in the reader that is felt so often by school administrators and teachers in the poor schools he was visiting. More specifically, the inclusion of the words "fig...
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Spencer Burdette - Shame of the Nation Blog Post #2

Argument While the first chapter of Kozol's book was more expositional, the second chapter is where he begins to expose what is causing the racial inequities in America's education system. The main focus of this second chapter was to argue that the repression of minority students is lifelong, starting young and continuing through their developmental years and into high school. This argument is embodied by this quote: "...the governmentally administered diminishment of value in the children of the poor begins even before the age of five or six when they begin their years of formal education in the public schools. It starts during their infant years and toddler years when hundreds of thousands of children in low-income neighborhoods are locked out of the opportunity for preschool education for no reason but the accident of birth and budgetary choices of the government"(Kozol 49, 50).  In this paragraph, Kozol is making the claim that the the government has a con...
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Jonathan Kozol - The Shame of the Nation Blog Post #1

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As I began reading this book, a few things became very clear to me. The first: My experience surrounding public education is very different than what most high school students get. The second: Our country seems to have been taking steps backward when it comes to public schools, and mostly in the inner cities. Kozol captures this excellently by using anecdotes to make the reader truly understand the magnitude of the problem. On the first page, he introduces a new character, a girl, named Pineapple. He describes her as a "plump and bright-eyed child who had captured my attention when I leaned over her desk and noticed that she wrote her letters in reverse."(Kozol 13) By describing this girl as happy and charmingly misguided, he sets the reader's expectations high. However, the next few lines subvert them entirely. He describes his next visit to Pineapple's high school, in the spring of 1997, as follows: The school was in a state of chaos because there had been ...
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