Author says segregation endures in Seattle, nation

Jonathan Kozol is an award-winning author of several books about the differences in schools for the rich and the poor in America: "Savage Inequalities," "Amazing Grace," and now, "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America" (Crown, 416 pp., $25)

Kozol visited 60 schools over the past several years for his latest book, including Thurgood Marshall Elementary in the Seattle School District. He concludes that the racial segregation in the nation's schools is higher than it's been since 1968, and that conditions for students in inner-city schools are, as a result, getting worse.

He started a conversation by noting he's spending more time in Seattle than any other city on his book tour because he wants to reinforce the "good people there who haven't given up on Brown v. Board of Education."

"I'm really grateful to the Seattle Public Schools for fighting in defense of racial integration by defending the tiebreaker," he said, referring to the district's policy of using race as one factor in assigning students to popular schools, a policy that's been suspended while under challenge in court. "There aren't too many school districts that have the guts to do that."

Q: Why did you choose to visit Thurgood Marshall?

A: Almost all the schools I visit, I visit by accident. Somebody I know says, "I know the principal and he'll invite you to visit." I also chose that school out of enthusiasm. I've always thought of Seattle as a relatively progressive city. So I thought, "Hooray, I'm going to see a school named for Thurgood Marshall that exemplifies what Marshall fought for."

It wasn't until I walked into the school that I realized I was in a basically segregated school. (Editor's note: According to the district, Marshall's racial breakdown in Oct. 2004 was 63 percent African American, 19 percent Latino, 15 percent Asian and 2 percent Caucasian).

Let me say briefly: The intensity of segregation in Seattle is not even in the same ballpark as Chicago and New York. In the New York neighborhood I write about, 99.8 percent of the children in the public schools are black or Latino. Two-tenths of 1 percentage point marks the difference between legally enforced segregation in the South 50 years ago and socially and residentially enforced segregation today. Not much of a victory after all these years.

Q: Thurgood Marshall is a school that's often held up as a success because, up until this year, its test scores were rising.

A: In every city in America, you can find a handful of segregated schools which, at one point of another, appear to boost their scores. ... They are almost always exceptional situations, either because they have an unusually charismatic principal, or because they happen to have a cluster of unusually terrific teachers.

But the main reason you get these temporary blips in test scores is that so much time is devoted to drilling children for exams. At the time I visited Thurgood Marshall, there was almost nonstop emphasis on a kind of robotic curriculum in which children were exposed to repeated incantations and slogans, posted everywhere.

Q: You make the case for integrated schools. Yet in Seattle, forced busing ended in part because it was a one-way street, with many more minority students than white students taking those buses.

A: The newest trendy slogan in America is "neighborhood schools." But if you ask black parents in any deeply segregated, under-funded school system, "If you could put your child on a bus for a 30-minute ride to a school system where 95 percent of the kids graduate, and virtually all of them go to four-year colleges, would you consider this a cruel thing to do to your little girl?" When I ask that question, most black parents I know ask me, "Are you crazy?"

Q: In your book, you note that Thurgood Marshall is a segregated school in an integrated neighborhood. Do you see that as worse than places where segregated schools are in segregated neighborhoods?

A: To me, the issue is that almost anywhere you go in the United States today, if you want to see a really segregated school, you ask for a school named Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks or Thurgood Marshall. It's the ultimate irony.

Q: You make it sound as if the educational challenges of many low-income, minority children would disappear if they just attend integrated schools. What about all the factors in children's lives that are outside a school's control?

A: It's obvious that no one change is going to work miracles. But there's something conveniently self-serving when a segregated white society points to all those quote "other factors" that might also damage a child. They use the things they can't change to avoid doing the one thing they can.

We don't know how to transform the health-care system next year, and we don't know what to do about decrepit housing next year we could open up the doors of the best schools in America and we could admit to those schools the children who are presently locked out of white society. And if we're not prepared to do that, we could at least pour money into inner-city schools to give them at least a shot at equal opportunity.

Q: You clearly want to shake up the middle class with this book to do something about the conditions in urban schools. What do you think they should do?

A: First, instead of putting all that time and energy into doing fund-raising that is purely selfish and will benefit only their own children, they should devote the very same dynamic energy into fighting like hell to guarantee the same very high quality of education to all the children in the city of Seattle.

Q: If you had children, where would you send them to school?

A: I would send them to a public school in the city in which I lived. I would insist that it be a racially mixed school, and then I would join the parents of the minority children in the school to fight like hell to make sure the politicians hear from us.

I don't condemn people who send their kids to private schools. Often they do so for good reasons of their own, including religious reasons. It's understandable as a personal choice, but it's rotten social policy, and I do make that distinction.

Linda Shaw: lshaw@seattletimes.com