Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age and The Shame of the Nation

By Amy Rothschild, Yale University student

“How was your day at school?” It is a question that has caused millions of students to roll their eyes, for centuries, or at least for the past few decades. And it is the question that, for decades, Jonathan Kozol has persisted in asking thousands of American students. Kozol has spent his adult life in America’s classrooms as a teacher and nationally recognized writer, moving his experiences inside the classroom out onto the page. So what does Kozol think of the state of education in America? Scanning the titles of his books will give you a pretty good idea of his bent—Death at an Early Age (1967), Savage Inequalities (1992), and, most recently, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (2005). A straight-talker and heartfelt advocate for better schools, he has garnered praise from administrators, teachers, parents and students, as well as criticism from those who claim he simply writes the same book over and over again.

A side-by-side reading of his first book, Death at an Early Age, and his most recent, Shame of the Nation, shows, however, what has changed—and what hasn’t—in Kozol’s career, and in America’s urban school systems. Death at an Early Age is essentially Kozol’s narrative of his first year teaching a fourth grade class in a public school in the neighborhood of Roxbury in Boston. He writes with an intensely personal style, chronicling his struggle as a bright-eyed, privileged college graduate to understand and combat the latent and overt racism staining the school. In Shame of the Nation, Kozol writes from the perspective of a more experienced, national figure, drawing from a wealth of anecdotes and statistics to illustrate how our school systems shortchange minorities.  

Of course, there are similarities between the two books. In both, Kozol closely follows the story of a single student. Death at an Early Age introduces us to Stephen, an eight-year-old a ward of the state of Massachusetts, who comes to school beaten and often leaves with fresh bruises from his teachers. In Shame of the Nation, we meet Pineapple, whom Kozol gets to know over a period of six years while visiting P.S. 65 in the Bronx. Over the course of 1994, her fourth-grade year, Pineapple has four different teachers. She surprises Kozol by asking him what it is like, “over there where you live . . . where the other people are.” What she’s getting at is the question of how life is different in the world of white people.

The comparison of Stephen and Pineapple is a difficult one to reconcile. Stephen’s case is unmistakably grave. Pinapple’s situation is somewhat harder to get to the bottom of; the reader’s reception to her story is hindered by the fact that her name is undeniably cartoonish, which makes her seem less real. In many ways, this disparity reflects the differing climates Mr. Kozol describes in his two books. Death at an Early Age depicts a society that is openly racist. The student body in Roxbury is almost entirely black and is stewarded primarily by white leaders, whose attitudes toward their students range from complacent to actively intolerant. Kozol highlights a speech he witnessed a member of the Boston School Committee give before assembled parents: the Committee member called it “Racial Ratios” and expounded that the ideal proportion of white to “Negro” students in any classroom in Massachusetts was 25 to 1.

While the overt racial discrimination that ravaged the Roxbury school in 1967, expressed through corporal punishment and derogatory public speeches by school board members, is a thing of the past, racism still shapes our educational system. In The Shame of the Nation, Mr. Kozol introduces us to Pineapple and dozens of other students to drive home the point that our schools still do not fulfill the promise of equality. America’s schools today are still overwhelmingly segregated, with wildly different standards and curriculum—and resources.  As it stands, segregated inner-city schools are almost six times as likely to be schools of concentrated poverty than primarily white schools.  It’s a grim fact that contradicts the idea tacitly accepted in some liberal circles that, “you can throw money at the problem all you want, but things still won’t improve.”  And so we expect these schools to improve, the heavy hand of No Child Left Behind threatening to close schools that don’t—all the while denying them the money and cultural resources they need to change their course.  It’s a throwback to the ideology of separate but equal, he declares, to expect segregated schools isolated from the resources of mainstream America to match their performance.

So, how do we fix America’s schools? Our options are not in black and white—the problem is that our schools still are. Mr. Kozol calls for a widespread political movement to change that.

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