Apartheid America

There is a lot of controversy these days, both in urban and suburban schools, regarding the repercussions of using corporate money and sponsorships to infuse struggling school budgets with cash and supplies. Given the extent of their need, it seems as if the schools you write about would be particularly vulnerable to that influence. Do you believe a corporate presence in schools can ever be beneficial?

Some of the most grotesque examples of the apartheid curriculum are when corporate indoctrination invades not simply the high schools but the elementary schools. I'm thinking of the schools I write about in Ohio -- and there are many like these across the country -- where little kids in second and third grade were learning to read by reading want ads and learning to write by writing job applications. And they had on their desks earnings charts, which said, basically, "How much is my sentence worth?" And then there was a classroom bank on the wall where your earnings would be accrued and they had pictures of dollar bills as an incentive. I think most enlightened white American parents, because they have power, would tear down a school that made such a reductionist curriculum. Sure, most middle-class white Americans would love their kids to be successful economically, but they also want them to be culturally empowered, they want them to love beauty for its own sake, they want them to read a good book, not in the robotic voice of children who have been drilled nonstop in phonics and only in phonics, but with real comprehension.

You write that "passion and delight" are seen as luxuries in most inner-city schools. Do you mean to say white kids have the luxury of childhood and kids of color do not?

I go out of my way at the end of the book to devote an entire chapter to inner-city schools that try very hard to resist those trends. I go into great detail to describe one school in the South Bronx and one in Durham, N.C., in which good, hard skills are delivered to children but where it's also fun to be in school and where the teachers have a chance to be fascinated by the children's fascination, which is one of the great rewards for a teacher. If you take that away from a teacher, if you take away the delight and mischievousness of childhood, it's hard to see what's left to compensate her for her rotten pay and for the limited respect she gets in this society. The president has the arrogance to blame these teachers if test scores don't go up; he accuses them of "low expectations" and charges them with "soft bigotry." That's a lot of chutzpah for a president who has never lifted a finger to even touch on the issue of school segregation or to give the segregated schools funds to meet his demands.

Just after Katrina, Bill O'Reilly went on the air saying that the looting of New Orleans should serve as a lesson to poor black kids who are messing up in school and "living the ghetto lifestyle." Personal accountability is also a big buzzword in this administration. What's the problem with telling kids to pull themselves up by their bootstraps?

Conservatives love to see ghetto schools that are plastered with self-help posters. I quote one where the children have to chant, "If it is to be, it is up to me." Well, that's about as far from the truth as imaginable. But accountability in the president's worldview is all one way. Most of these kids, by the way, are denied preschool. The president has cut Head Start, so now less than 50 percent of eligible students get to participate. The president does nothing to provide these kids with pre-K education, while friends of mine send their children to $20,000-a-year preschools -- lovely little Montessori schools -- starting at the age of 2 and a half. When the kids who are denied preschool get to third grade, they're given a high-stakes exam and they're held accountable for their performance. There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an 8-year-old accountable for her performance on an exam but doesn't hold the president accountable for robbing her of what he gave his own kids when they were 2 and a half years old.

As someone who has had every educational advantage, I find it hard not to feel sick and ashamed after reading your book.

A lot of privileged white kids read my books because for some reason the wealthiest white high schools tend to assign my books to their seniors. And these kids send me poignant letters and say, essentially, "My victories are won in a game that was rigged to my advantage in advance." And yes, they are proud that they got into Harvard or Michigan or Reed or wherever, but they also feel embarrassed by the fact that these are not pure victories, they are tarnished ones. We have a meritocracy in the U.S. but it's increasingly a hereditary meritocracy in which the lines are both lines of class and of race.

I didn't write this book simply to provoke another incestuous and interesting debate among inert liberals. I wrote this book to ask my liberal friends to get up off their asses and deal with an injustice which is right before their eyes. There are too many books about the heroic struggles of the 1960s and the courage people showed then. Those books exempt us from summoning up the courage we need to face the injustices from which we still benefit today.

• View blog reactions