Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I'm joined today by Jonathan Kozo. He is one of the country's leading critics of the education system. W writers on education for decades.

Now he has been writing on the public school system and apartheid schooling in America.

He is the winner of the National Book Award, the author of such books as Savage Inequalities,

Amazing Grace, The Shame of the Nation, and most recently, a summation of his critique,

an end to inequality breaking down the walls of apartheid education in America. Jonathan Kozo,

thank you for joining us on current affairs today. Hi, Nathan. It's great to be with you. If I may, I'd like to start right in by just giving

you a sense of the essence of my new book. Sure. By saying that the public schools in

United States today are an ethical embarrassment and a betrayal of democracy, not only because

of the glaringly unequal way we fund our public schools, the United States, but more to the point

at this moment of so much racial tension in America, because of the seemingly eternal segregation

of the schools and the brutalizing toll this takes on black and Latino children for no fault of their own.

With school segregation right now at its highest level since the early

1990s, the nation has eviscerated the legacy of Brown versus Board of Education and ripped

apart the dream of Dr. King. And let me just go on a bit more to say that I'm a part of

education to me. It's like the big white elephant in the middle of the room that we pretend that we

can't see. None of the cycles of highly publicized urban school reform that come and go from year to year, and temporarily

you make the headlines. None of these reforms, and I've seen probably two dozen of them

in my career, none of these have made the slightest difference in the outcomes of the schools

where a vicious code of discipline takes the place of

anything like democratic learning. The refusal of the powerful, the powers that be, and I don't

mean simply political conservatives, but also the refusal of too many timid liberals to, what I call semi-liberals, to batter down the walls between two separate worlds of education,

has resulted in what I call the routine amputation of potential in millions of our most vulnerable children.

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