Kozol Pt. 1

     It took me a few pages to adjust to Kozol's understanding and use of "segregation," "isolation," and "diversity."  What I experienced was something like vertigo, I guess, and it's still only beginning to sink in as conceivable that an eighteen year veteran of the New York public school system could go her entire career and teach only one white student (3).
     In addition to positing (through the words of underserved students) that the extant inequality he observes in N.Y. schools is more systematic than systemic, Kozol makes the case for it starting even earlier due to the proliferation of pre-preschool education in the form of "Baby Ivies" (9).  He seems to suggest that even those  concepts traditionally presented during and associated with child rearing ["...how to hold a crayon or a pencil, identify(ing) perhaps a couple of shapes or colors, or recogniz(ing) that printed pages go from left to right." (9)] can be monetized and therefore put further out of reach of those who would benefit most from its availability.  Instead, admission spots in these ultra-elite institutions are fought for and divvied up among those with the means to pay.  His idea is to illustrate how this has become just one more instrument by which the wealthy measure their wealth.  In terms, I suppose, of how much further from the massive underserved population it places them.
     (2 or 3 hours and some leftover dirty rice later) I am wondering just what it is Jonathan Kozol leaves us with. If there are direct marching orders, I might be missing them.  If he eloquently and quantitatively enumerates the laughable way those in schools with political interests ascribe diversity to a student body that is 99.6% racially homogeneous, he just as adroitly points out how the achievement gap is widened by unequal access to early education.  Later, he holds up Success For All and its ilk as toothless, and exposes the uselessness of procedurally shuttling students into classes far beneath their ability and interest level.
I think...
I'm pretty sure that's what he's doing here...
In any case, he may be making a point that transcends the format of "this good, that bad."  It may be just that he is pointing out that work still needs doing (21-22).  Either that or he does not leave us with much at all, and that just sort of sounds wrong.
What: the author writes that, for a variety of reasons including the recent dismantling of Brown v. Board of Education's mandates (20), today's schools are just as segregated as they were pre-integration.
So What: This trend resurrects the dangers people worked hard to eradicate the first time around.
What Now: Keep working, but some methods are better than others.  Turning schools into Skinnerboxes is not preferable.