In their respective critiques, both Nathan Glazer and Sandra Stotsky tore apart Kozol’s main arguments in The Shame of the Nation, including his claim that a major reason for the large academic gap between urban “segregated” schools and predominantly white suburban schools is the large discrepancies in school funding. Kozol discusses how the “per-pupil spending levels in the New York City schools is $11,700”, but in Manhasset, a wealthy suburban neighborhood just under 30 miles away from New York City, districts spend around $22,000 per-student yearly, (Kozol 45). Kozol enriches his argument by illustrating how the lack of funding limits basic resources, such as textbooks or even chairs, in inner-city schools and negatively affects the learning of the minority children …show more content…
Kozol believes that urban schools need to spend more on their students to provide an “adequate” education, but Glazer counters this by saying “there is no strong evidence [greater expenditure] would do much for test results,” (Glazer). Though Glazer does believe that spending more money in these schools “would make life pleasanter” in these environments, he disagrees that this would drastically increase educational results. Stotsky, in her critique, calls out Kozol for not discussing whether the “policies he urges... would in fact improve black achievement,” (Stotsky). Stotsky struggles to find “focused or coherent discussion” in Kozol’s books especially on the topic of why low-income children still have “such dismal results” coming out of the public education system “despite regularly increasing federal funding” to inner-city schools (Stotsky). Stotsky calls on Kozol to focus more on addressing the “assumption…that black students are incapable of learning the same curriculum” and less on his other half-developed