Still Separate, Still Unequal Analysis Essay

In his essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid,” Jonathan Kozol brings our attention to the apparent growing trend of racial segregation within America’s urban and inner-city schools (309-310). Kozol provides several supporting factors to his claim stemming from his research and observations of different school environments, its teachers and students, and personal conversations with those teachers and students.

America’s education systems suffers from a multitude of problems but the main issues, are the imbalance found between urban and suburban school districts. Most people do not even realize that our public-schools is slowly easing its way back to fully segregated schools. Urban schools are now full of majority Black and Hispanic students, while Suburban schools are full of White students.The two types of school districts have two totally different educational outcomes. Public education in urban areas is said to be significantly worse than suburban areas. Only about 19% of students from urban school districts seek higher education compared to 70% of their suburban counterparts (Pew Research Center, 2011). Suburban and urban sectors of the education

It has become common today to dismiss the lack of education coming from our impoverished public schools. Jonathan Kozol an award winning social injustice writer, trying to bring to light how our school system talks to their students. In his essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal," Kozol visits many public high schools as well as public elementary schools across the country, realizing the outrageous truth about segregating in our public education system. Kozol, cross-examining children describing their feelings as being put away where no one desires your presence. Children feeling diminished for being a minority; attending a school that does not take into consideration at the least the child’s well being. Showing clear signs of segregation in the education system.

     In Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol documents the devastating inequalities in American schools, focusing on public education’s “savage inequalities” between affluent districts and poor districts. From 1988 till 1990, Kozol visited schools in over thirty neighborhoods, including East St. Louis, the Bronx, Chicago, Harlem, Jersey City, and San Antonio. Kozol describes horrifying conditions in these schools. He spends a chapter on each area, and provides a description of the city and a historical basis for the impoverished state of its school. These schools, usually in high crime areas, lack the most basic needs. Kozol creates a scene of rooms without heat, few supplies or text, labs with no

In the essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal” by Jonathan Kozol, the situation of racial segregation is refurbished with the author’s beliefs that minorities (i.e. African Americans or Hispanics) are being placed in poor conditions while the Caucasian majority is obtaining mi32 the funding. Given this, the author speaks out on a personal viewpoint, coupled with self-gathered statistics, to present a heartfelt argument that statistics give credibility to. Jonathan Kozol is asking for a change in this harmful isolation of students, which would incorporate more funding towards these underdeveloped schools. This calling is directed towards his audience of individuals who are interested in the topic of public education (seeing that this

Our culture in America puts a huge emphasis on the value of education. However, not all children in America receive the same benefits from school. Jonathan Kozol, author of The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, explores the feelings of those in lower-income districts and the inequality they feel. Kozol focuses on how younger children, elementary schoolers, look around and see richer schools while their own school is run-down and falling apart. People are very aware of the score gap between rich schools and poor schools. Despite our awareness, we miss the main point by trying to close the “word gap”. This gap will only grow larger as poor school districts are economically disenfranchised repeatedly,

The American education system is failing the generations of the future. Society neglects the children born into impoverished areas, while mainly white upper class children participate in superior educational activities. Low-income neighborhoods often produce schools with low scoring students. Therefore the government transitions these schools into impersonal factories. The phrase diversity masquerades the reality of re-segregation of schools. Many schools across the country are utilizing the phrase diversity, yet the statistics reveal that over ninety percent of the students are black or Hispanic. Creating successful environments is extremely difficult and subsequently results in serious consequences for the American education system.

Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol explains the inequalities of school systems in different poor neighborhoods. Kozol was originally a teacher in a public school in Boston. This school didn’t have very many resources and was unable to keep teachers for very long. After pursuing other interests, Kozol took the time from 1988-1990 to meet with children and teachers in several different neighborhoods to better understand issues relating to the inequality and segregation in the school systems. Kozol writes from his own perspective as he visits six different cities and the poorest schools in those cities. These cities consist of East St. Louis in Illinois, the South Side of Chicago in Illinois, New York City, Camden in New Jersey, Washington

The article, “Still Separate, Still Unequal” by Jonathan Kozol, is basically about how the school system of today is still separated and still unequal according to those with different skin color or race. Even though the court case ‘Brown v. Board of Education’, intentionally was made to fix this problem, everything stayed the same. Kozol’s argument was to prove that the school systems are separated and unequal for students based on their race or the color of their skin. He proved his point by using many facts to help explain that there are many cities and areas within the school system that are unequal and separated. The use of pure facts instead of personal opinions makes this issue seem like a real problem instead of a one man’s opinion.

In the article “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Education Apartheid” author Jonathan Kozol informs us about inequality and segregation in today’s school systems. Kozol talks about schools were minority’s makes up the student body. For example, Kozol refers to John F. Kennedy High School where the majority of the student body is made up by African Americans and Hispanic students, only a third of the students are white. Kozol states that schools like these are typically underprivileged schools that normally have structural issues and also lack behind in technology and resources for students. Kozol also brings up the predominately white schools where on average there is more money spent on students and funding is not a problem, these

Twenge uses Ethos to back up most of her data, which is very important since she is doing the researching by herself. Twenge states “I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology” (Twenge, 2), which explains to us that she has experience in what she is doing so we should trust her. Pathos is when the author is trying to appeal to our emotions by trying to trigger an emotional response to what they are saying. Twenge uses Pathos in her book-ending when she is interviewing a teenager who goes by Athena (the name Twenge uses for the teen in this article) and some throughout her article. One example of her using it is at the bottom of page two in her article when she says “These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household.

For the past couple of years, “ Black lives matter,” has been everywhere from social media to the news. It is hard to ignore how racism has dominated the headlines. When it comes to economic status and race, parts of America are as segregated as today as they were fifty years ago, and nowhere is that segregation more obvious than public schools. When the Supreme Court ruled on segregated schools in 1954, it said that separate facilities in unequal and that equality and education was fundamental for any child’s success. Studies have showed that low-income kids in low-income schools do badly, but low-income kids attending middle-income schools tend to do a lot better.

Recent data from the Civil Rights Project show that school segregation is very high for Latino and Black students and that this segregation is almost always what Gary Orfield called “double segregation,” that is, segregation by both race/ethnicity and poverty. In the 2009–2010 school year, 74 percent of Black and 80 percent of Hispanic students attended schools where 50 to 100 percent of the students were minori¬ties. In

Janelle Scott and Rand Quinn examine the racial politics of education in the six decades Post-Brown Era in their article, “The Politics of Education in the Post-Brown Era: Race, Markets, and the Struggle for Equitable Schooling”. The authors analyze market reform trends and how they are being justified by those within the school system. San Francisco and Philadelphia are the two cities being focused on and how market trends are affecting the schools and its children. Racial, Linguistic and socioeconomic segregation in public education are being observed within these cities. As the authors did their research they

Six decades after Brown v. Board of Education ruled segregation unlawful, schools in America are more segregated than they were in the early 1960’s. Recently a study made by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project released a list of severely segregated school districts in the nation, which showcases New York City at the top of the list. Contrary to New York City’s appeal on diversity, “81.7% of black students in New York City attend segregated schools” highlighting the failure of educational equity (Yin). Segregation in New York City’s public-school system occurred, in part, as a result of the construction of public housing in the city. During the 1950’s, the federal and local governments used public housing to increasingly segregate African Americans into low income urban neighborhoods while funding middle-class whites with mortgage guarantees and forcing them to abandon the urban areas for a more affluent area (Rothstein). Even with the desegregation mandates backed by Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there was a lot of resistance for integration causing segregation to travel into schools. Within each school, ability grouping (or grouping students into classrooms and/or courses based on ability) purposely creates a “superior” group that considers itself greater than others in their level. In the years immediately following integration those who were in the lower group were often minorities from a disadvantaged background (Nelson 364).