Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

Jonathan Kozol used this line in the context of his late-20th/early-21st-century critique of U.S. public schooling, arguing that gains associated with Brown v. Board of Education had eroded and that many urban districts had become intensely segregated again by race and poverty. The remark reflects his on-the-ground reporting in large-city school systems (especially in the Northeast) and his broader argument that policy choices—district boundary lines, housing patterns, unequal school funding, and the retreat from active desegregation enforcement—produced a “resegregation” that was not merely incidental but stark and accelerating.

Kozol is warning that, despite the formal end of legally mandated segregation after Brown v. Board of Education, American public schools have drifted back toward separation by race and class through housing patterns, district boundaries, unequal funding, and policy choices. The phrase “with a vengeance” underscores not a mild regression but an aggressive resurgence—segregation returning in intensified form, often accompanied by stark disparities in resources, teacher experience, facilities, and expectations. In Kozol’s broader critique, this resegregation is not an accidental byproduct of “neighborhood schools” but a moral and civic failure that undermines equal opportunity and the democratic promise of public education.