3059 Savage Inequalities

Jonathan Kozol, educator and author of Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools and other books on education, believes that schools in the United States are not only "fiercely segregated but outrageously unequal." Speaking to hundreds of Unitarian Universalists in a major lecture at General Assembly, Kozol cited statistics and told stories to prove this point.

In order to demonstrate that U.S. schools are becoming increasingly segregated, Kozol spoke about a school in the South Bronx in New York city which he has recently visited more than 300 times. "There are 11,000 children in the elementary schools in the South Bronx," said Kozol, and of those thousands of children, "exactly 26 are white. That's a segregation rate of 99.8%." Kozol made a comparison to school segregation under the Jim Crow laws in the southern United States in the mid-20th century. "The socially and economically enforced apartheid in northern cities today," he said, "is separated by only 0.2% from legally established apartheid in the South of the past."

Kozol contended that United States schools provide dramatically unequal quality of education. He asked his audience first to think of a child named "Pineapple" who lives in the South Bronx. Per-pupil expenditures in the South Bronx run about $8,000 a year. "Compare that to $12,000 a year that would be spent on Pineapple if she lived in a white suburb of New York," said Kozol.

If Pineapple lived in one the wealthiest suburbs of New York, according to Kozol as much as $18,000 might be spent on her education in the public schools. "Children might be equal in the eyes of God," said Kozol, "but not in the eyes of Americans. It shouldn't be like this in a democratic nation, it must be changed, and I hope some of you will fight like hell to change it."

While he has found glaring differences in school funding, Kozol believes the real problem lies in "the apartheid inherent in our nation's residential patterns." Inequalities in the schools arise from the de facto segregation of American cities and towns. "The intensity of segregation and the deepening of segregation to me is the heart of the matter," he said.

"Rather than face the fact of segregation and confront it head on," Kozol charged, "people turn instead to acts of charity." Kozol supports charitable giving and service programs such as tutoring and mentoring programs, saying "these things are acts of virtue in and of themselves." But charitable acts are not enough. "Charity is not a substitute for justice. It never was, and it is not now."

Children in the poorest communities in the United States, according to Kozol, "enter school two or three years pedagogically delayed behind" the children in the most affluent communities. As a result, he stated that "there is not even a pretense of a meritocracy" in the United States educational system.

"My Harvard classmates are sending their children to preschools when they are two and a half years old," said Kozol, yet government has refused to fund universal access to preschool programs such as Head Start. "Teachers can see a big difference between children with three years of preschool, and those who have none."

Kozol contrasts the lack of government support for universal preschool education to current widespread support for high-stakes testing. "I'm not a dewy-eyed romantic who thinks that tests can be ignored," said Kozol. "We live in a world where children are tested in a thousand ways. Still there is something venomous, cruel, and retroactive" in the way testing is imposed. "Tests and standards without prior equity," he said, "are not instruments of change but merely clubs with which to bludgeon children whom we have been cheating from the hour of their birth, and a means to humiliate their teachers."

"I believe our churches should stand out in the forefront of this struggle" to provide equal and non-segregated education to all children, said Kozol. But churches cannot do this without facing the realities of social and economic disparities. "So long as there are virtually segregated suburbs, there will be virtually segregated schools."

In closing, Kozol gave this charge to his audience: "My friends, life goes so fast, use it well. God bless you all."

Reported for the Web by Dan Harper; Web Design by Julie Albanese