Kozol begins Chapter 1 by introducing Pineapple, a student he befriended in 1994 when visiting her South Bronx kindergarten class. Pineapple was a “plump and bright-eyed child” who gradually grew “quite depressed” as “massive teacher turnover” caused “chaos” in her school (13). In fourth grade, she asked Kozol an unexpected question, wondering what it was like “over there […] where other people are” (15). Initially confused, Kozol interpreted Pineapple’s question to be referring to white people. The pastor of Pineapple’s church-run after-school program pointed out that Pineapple and her classmates were “almost totally cut off” from white society and lacked “knowledge of the ordinary reference points that are familiar to most [white] children” (17). For example, Kozol remarks that many older students considering college have never heard of schools like Cornell, Columbia, New York University, or even more local schools. Occasionally, the children are taken out of their neighborhood for “Interracial Days,” where they have the opportunity to interact with white children, but these “token days” simply “ease our feelings of regret about the way things have to be for the remainder of the year” (18).

Kozol suggests that most Americans are under the impression that issues of segregation have improved since the 1960s. However, in reality, many schools in the northeast and south are “resegregating,” and there has been no effort to reverse this trend. According to a Harvard University study, nearly three-quarters of Black and Hispanic students attend schools where students of color are the majority, and more than 2 million students attend “apartheid schools” where the student body is 99-100% nonwhite. According to the study, there was “a very brief period of serious enforcement” of desegregation policies, after which “the issue of racial segregation and its consequences has been ignored” (19-20). Instead, “elected officials and school leaders” engage in an “exercise in denial” regarding the consequences of segregation (20). Ironically, schools that bear the names of great civil rights icons like Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall are often the most segregated.

Even in integrated neighborhoods, white families often make a “conscious effort” to “avoid the integration option that is often right at their front door” (22). At Thurgood Marshall Elementary School in Seattle, for example, many white families sent their children on buses to schools in other districts. At another school named for Martin Luther King in the upper-middle-class Upper West Side of Manhattan, white families similarly “showed great reluctance to permit their children to enroll” and chose instead to commute to schools further away (25).

Kozol describes these segregated schools as “tense, disorderly, and socially unhappy places” that are prone to violence, which then reinforces white parents’ desire to send their children elsewhere (26). When a school shooting broke out at Martin Luther King High in 2002, the media was quick to denounce the violence as a disgrace to King’s legacy and point out conditions that made violence possible at the school, such as large class sizes and problematic “[a]rchitectural aspects.” However, no one mentioned the school’s segregation in regard to King’s legacy, nor were “the direct and indirect emotional and psychological effects of segregated schooling” mentioned as causes for the violence (28).

Students in such schools are well aware of the segregation they face; one New York high schooler told Kozol she felt she and her classmates were “being hidden” from the rest of the United States. In the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, the court argued that separating Black and white children “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone” (29). Decades later, Kozol says that “official culture” continues to honor the Brown v. Board of Education ruling “as evidence of something good, progressive, and enlightened in our social history” (30), but “official actions” fiercely disavow the ruling. Across the country, white parents have “sometimes openly demanded” separate “protected enclaves” for their children’s education, often under the guise of seeking tighter-knit community schools.

Kozol explains that New York is home to one of the United States’ “highest levels of housing segregation,” making it “the epicenter of segregated public education” (32). Racial segregation is nearly unchanged from the 1960s, and the schools in suburban neighborhoods surrounding New York City are often 100% Black and Hispanic. In the face of this extreme residential segregation, many argue that “our only realistic goal” is improving these segregated schools. Officials in predominately Black schools find themselves compelled to abandon the principles laid out in Brown v. Board of Education and instead return to the concept of “separate but equal” that governed the Jim Crow South. Kozol suggests that “equality” now “seems beyond the realm of probability,” and many principals of segregated schools settle instead for “adequacy” (34).

Here, Kozol begins to describe the deflated self-confidence of many children in segregated schools. In schools like Seattle’s Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, Kozol describes the children starting the day with motivational chants, such as “If it is to be, it’s up to me” (35). This is meant to combat “what is believed to be the children’s loss of willingness ‘to try’” (35). However, Kozol notes that these chants are “place holders” and a more effective way to build children’s confidence would require “[changing] the make-up of their peers” so that Black and brown children are no longer “cordoned off by a society that isn’t sure they really can” learn (38).

Kozol begins Chapter 2 by describing letters he received from a third-grade class in the Bronx. The children described various problems at their school, but Kozol’s attention was particularly captured by a girl called Elizabeth, who wrote that she wished her school was “the most beautiful school in the whole why [sic] world” (40). Over the years, Kozol had visited many schools in the Bronx, all of which were in various states of disrepair. In one, “a stream of water flowed down one of the main stairwells on a rainy afternoon,” and in another, “recess was impossible because there was no outdoor playground and no indoor gym” (40-41). All were overcrowded; some teachers didn’t have enough chairs for their students, and some schools shortened the schooldays to teach two shifts of students. Most had no libraries or music and art programs.

During the 1970s, many schools lost their art and music teachers as well as school physicians. By 1993, there were only 23 doctors in New York City schools, down from 400 in 1970. Many children in the Bronx suffered from asthma due to the proximity of a medical waste incinerator, and there was no one to see to them if they experienced a serious attack at school. Most officials attribute these changes to budget issues, but Kozol points out that “the changing racial demographics of the student population” must be considered (42). Even when “financial markets soared,” schools in the Bronx continued to operate in buildings that should have “been condemned.”

Although Kozol traveled to schools across the country, he got to know the children of Bronx elementary schools particularly well. He argues that the investment made in schools that children like Pineapple attend “tells us something about what we think these kids are worth to us in human terms and in the contributions they may someday make to our society” (44). In the school year of 1997-1998, the education of a third-grader in a New York City public school cost the Board of Education around $8,000. Meanwhile, in a white suburb of New York, that increased to $12,000, and in a wealthier white suburb, it jumped to as much as $18,000. Teachers in New York City public schools are also paid significantly less than those in the suburbs, and within the City’s public schools, new teachers, who are paid less, are typically assigned to the most segregated schools in poor neighborhoods.

Furthermore, public schools in wealthier neighborhoods often raise private funds to supplement their public funding. Kozol gives the example of a public school in Greenwich Village, which raised $46,000 to hire an additional teacher, worried that increasing class sizes “would have a devastating impact” on their children’s education (46). Although the fairness of using private funds to bolster public school budgets is questionable, Kozol says that wealthy parents across the city have raised as much as a million dollars to pay for extra teachers, make building improvements, and add enrichment programs like art and music. Theoretically, schools in poorer districts are also permitted to fundraise but typically raise much smaller amounts. The use of private funds creates “added forms of inequality” that further separate the children of the poor from the children of the wealthy (48). These “boutique schools in an otherwise impoverished system” allow wealthy parents to “claim allegiance to the general idea of public schools while making sure their children do not suffer gravely for the stripped-down budgets” that affect poorer children (49).

Kozol argues that the government puts “a price tag” on children by determining how much their education is worth. However, this practice starts even before kindergarten, and many low-income children are excluded from preschool programs “for no reason but the accident of birth and budgetary choices of the government” (49-50). Wealthy parents in New York City often jump through a number of hoops to enroll their two- and three-year-olds in competitive early education programs known as “Baby Ivies.” On the other hand, many poor children don’t attend any preschool and begin kindergarten “without even […] very modest early-learning skills” (52).

In third grade, children begin taking “high-stakes tests” to progress to the next grade, so children who have more years of schooling under their belt have a significant advantage. Kozol argues that, if conditions were truly fair, “children of the poorest and least educated mothers would receive the most extensive and most costly preschool preparation” (54). In some cities, public funds are even used for preschool programs that exclude poor children. For example, Kozol describes a public school in Chicago that offered preschool education for nearly $6,000. Although the school was in a mostly Black and Hispanic neighborhood, the children in the preschool program were mostly white, and the Chicago Tribune reported that the program was meant to prevent the “brain drain” of white families from moving out of the neighborhood.

Practices like this are undoubtedly undemocratic and “have introduced a radical distorting prism” to public education (55). To ease some of their guilt, wealthy parents will often make the “paradoxical” argument that “money may not really matter that much after all” (56). They wonder if “the answer [is] really to throw money into these dysfunctional and failing schools” and suggest that “other factors” should be considered (56). Meanwhile, parents who doubt you can “buy your way to a better education for the children of the poor” will likely spend more than $20,000 per year on a private education for their child (57).

Others, however, stand by the argument that no amount of money will help a failing school, pointing to select examples of low-income schools with increased budgets that still fail to compete with their counterparts in middle-class districts. Kozol counters that this point of view ignores the “consequences of […] decades of low funding” as well as the disparity in preschool education and “the multiple effects of concentrated poverty and racial isolation” (60). Underfunded schools would need much more funding to compete with their wealthy, white counterparts, and it would take years to see the full results.

While some children of color undoubtedly do overcome the inequalities of public education and succeed in life, most American children do not need “heroic qualities” to flourish, nor do “they represent miraculous exceptions to the norm among their peers” (61). Rather, they fulfill the “ordinary expectations” that are supported by the “demonstrable advantages” of their schooling. The United States could give “virtually every child” such an education; however, the nation avoids such responsibility with “a claim to penury” (62). Meanwhile, the children suffering the worst of the United States public school system are kept out of sight and, therefore, are easy to ignore.