City's Schools Are Among America's Most Segregated

Fifty years after Rosa Parks struck a blow for integration by refusing to get up from her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., some of the most racially segregated schools in America are in New York City, an author claims in a new book on education - and voices across the political spectrum say he has a point.

In his new book, "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America," author Jonathan Kozol compares segregation in New York City schools to apartheid. He says that schools he visited in the Bronx are still as "deeply segregated" as they were three decades ago. Mr. Kozol quotes one teacher at P.S. 65 in the South Bronx who said, "I've been at this school for 18 years. This is the first white student I have ever taught."

According to a study he cites by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, New York is the most segregated state in the country for black students.

The head of the education reform department at the University of Arkansas and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Jay Greene, said the term apartheid might apply.

"It's just a charged word for describing a system that separates blacks and whites and serves blacks particularly poorly. It's a little touch of hyperbole but it does have a kernel of truth," Mr. Greene said. "But Kozol is on to something here. He is right that there are horrible outcomes for minority students. Yankee progressives shouldn't be contented that the problem is somewhere else. It's right where they are."

New York has the lowest graduation rate in the country for black students, Mr. Greene said.

"The system has clearly upheld a racially exclusionary policy, and that is what apartheid is. Whether you get there by omission or commission, the impact is the same and nobody is doing much to remedy that," the Reverend Al Sharpton told The New York Sun. "Clearly, we need to talk honestly about the fact that it exists."

A former Boston schoolteacher, Mr. Kozol has written almost a dozen books chronicling the injustice of the American education system. His most recent book was released last month by Crown.

Christy Setzer, a spokeswoman for the Democratic mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer, declined to comment on Mr. Kozol's use of the word "apartheid" but said the problem of inequality needs to be addressed.

"We know there's been an historic injustice in the NYC public school system. We know it because 50 percent of our kids drop out, and we know it from the fact that our schools have been shortchanged $23 billion from Albany - which the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit called a violation of students' civil rights," Ms. Setzer said in an e-mail.

In a letter this Sunday to the New York Times Book Review Mr. Kozol criticized people in New York and other Northern cities "who pretend to honor Dr. Martin Luther King while ripping apart the dream for which he died."

That may or may not be an accusation aimed at Mayor Bloomberg, who famously announced his sweeping educational reforms during a birthday celebration honoring King in 2003.

"The mayor by his own move has taken over the system," Rev. Sharpton said this week. "If he has the power, he has to be the one that has to lay out the plan."

The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said, "People need to pay attention to what Jonathan Kozol says." She said the mayor and the schools chancellor, Joel, Klein, need to spend more time "turning around low-performing schools rather than engaging in test prep and other types of so-called reforms."

A spokesman for the mayor referred calls to the Department of Education.

"We have focused on improving education for all of our students regardless of where they go to school. ...Test scores are up significantly and the achievement gap between white and minority students is decreasing," a department spokesman, Keith Kalb, said.

But not everybody is ready to accept Mr. Kozol's comparison to apartheid. The president of the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation for Democracy in Africa, Fred Oladeinde, said he had not read the book but was hesitant to compare the New York school system to South Africa.

"The experience of apartheid in South Africa is in a class of its own," he said.

"Citizens were not only denied due process, but not even considered citizens. ... There is no way you could project that to any citizen of New York. In New York, every citizen is treated as a full citizen, and there is a process to redress wrongs. ... To try to compare apartheid to anything in New York is really a stretch," Mr. Oladeinde said.