Kozol defines apartheid schools as those in which the student body is 99 to 100% Black and Hispanic. According to Gary Oldfield at the Civil Rights Project, during the 1990s, “more than two million” Black and Hispanic students attended these apartheid schools (18).

Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated schooling to be unconstitutional. The justices argued that segregated schooling “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone” (29). They added: “In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. […] Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (29).

No Child Left Behind was a policy signed into law by President George W. Bush in January 2001 that was designed to improve public schools. The policy required each state to set achievement standards that would be measured throughout the year with testing and accountability benchmarks. It was a controversial policy, and Kozol argues that it put more pressure on struggling urban schools without giving them the added resources needed to make meaningful changes.