An End to Inequality

Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America

By: Jonathan Kozol, Theodore M. Shaw - foreword

Narrated by: JD Jackson

An eloquent and passionate call for educational reparations, from the New York Times bestselling author

When Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age appeared in 1967, it rocked the education world. Based on the Rhodes Scholar’s first year of teaching in Boston’s Black community, the book described the abuse and neglect of children for no reason but the color of their skin. Since that National Book Award-winning volume, Kozol has spent more than fifty years visiting with children and working with their teachers in other deeply troubled and unequal public schools.

Now, in the culminating work of his career, Kozol goes back into the urban schools, where racial isolation is at the highest level since he became a teacher and is now compounded by a new regime of punitive instruction and coercive uniformity that is deemed to be appropriate for children who are said to be incapable of learning in more democratic ways, like children in more privileged communities.

Kozol believes it’s well past time to batter down the walls between two separate worlds of education and to make good, at long last, on the “promissory note” that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Sure to resonate with current-day arguments for reparations in a broad array of areas, this is a book that points us to a future in which children learn together, across the lines of class and race, in schools where every child is accorded a full and equal share of the riches in this wealthiest of nations.

©2024 by Jonathan Kozol (P)2024 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Foreword © 2024 by Theodore M. Shaw.

Critic reviews

“Golden Voice narrator JD Jackson's tone reflects the seriousness of Kozol's brief but disturbing audiobook. Jackson performs this indictment of the ‘savage inequalities’ of American schools with a measured pace and controlled cadence. He conveys the vigor of Kozol's takedown of the country's segregated schools, which he criticizes for their dilapidated buildings, stultifying curriculum, punitive teaching methods, and overall disregard for the real educational needs of Black and Latino students.… This is a short but powerful work.” —AudioFile Magazine

"An inspired and insightful analysis of race-based challenges in the American school system." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"In this vigorous polemic, National Book Award winner Kozol . . . [offers] an impassioned indictment of elementary school education in the U.S. and a cri de cœur for racial equity." —Publishers Weekly