Savage Inequalities
Roche, Barbara
SAVAGE INEQUALITIES Jonathan Kozol Crown Publishers, $20, 262 pp. Barbara Roche In 1988, Jonathan Kozol began a two-year journey, visiting schools and talking with school children...
...Kozol shows us again and again how these conditions affect the children...
...An urban planner in Washington, D.C., challenges, "If anybody thinks that money's not an issue, let the people in Montgomery County put their children in the D.C...
...The descriptions of the neighborhoods and the schools Kozol visited are almost numbing...
...There is enough money...
...Barbara Roche In 1988, Jonathan Kozol began a two-year journey, visiting schools and talking with school children in approximately thirty neighborhoods in cities throughout the U.S...
...That's how it is...
...No one needs to ration crayons, books, or toilet paper....All our children ought to be allowed a stake in the enormous richness of America...
...The rigging of the game and the acceptance, which is nearly universal, of uneven playing fields reflect a dark, unspoken sense that other people's children are of less inherent value than our own," writes Kozol...
...And a student in Camden declares, "So long as there are no white children in our school, we're going to be cheated...
...Lillian Parks, the superintendent of the East St...
...There is plenty of space...
...Most adolescents in the poorest neighborhoods learn very soon that they are getting less than children in the wealthier school districts...
...Unlike a tainted sports event, however, a childhood cannot be played again...
...The nation, he contends, has turned its back, morally if not yet legally, on Brown v. Board of Education...
...Looking around some of these inner-city schools, where filth and disrepair were worse than anything I'd seen in 1964, I often wondered why we would agree to let our children go to school in places where no politician, school board president, or business CEO would dream of working," says Kozol...
...The fact of ghetto education as a permanent American reality appeared to be accepted...
...That's America...
...This inequity has its roots in what Kozol calls "the arcane machinery by which we finance public education," the property tax...
...No child needs to use a closet for a classroom...
...Louis or America...
...Very poor communities do place a high priority on education and, in fact, often tax themselves at higher rates than do their affluent neighbors...
...Jonathan Kozol challenges us to work for a more expansive view of what is possible in American education...
...Trade with our children...
...What he found, "a remarkable degree of racial segregation that persisted almost everywhere," startled him...
...and the Washington, D.C., student who says, "By doing this [they] teach you how much you are hated...
...in Camden, New Jersey, teachers do not have books for half the children in their classes...
...That racial segregation, combined with stark economic inequity, Kozol says, creates a dual society in public education in America...
...in Chicago, pencils, paper, and crayons are rationed, beginning in January...
...A high school principal in Camden says, "If you don't believe that money makes a difference, let your children go to school in Camden...
...Louis student who asks, "Are we citizens of East St...
...In fact, the battles now being fought are to stop what the late Supreme Court Justice William Douglas termed "a dramatic retreat from Plessy v. Ferguson ." The principal of an elementary school in New York, when asked if race is the decisive factor in the poor condition of his school, states baldly, "This would not happen to white children...
...In East St...
...Echoing those thoughts are the East St...
...In response to the increasing popularity of the argument that, as the Wall Street Journal says, "money doesn't buy better education...cash alone can't do the trick," Kozol points out that no one is exhorting the wealthy districts to cut back on their investments in education...
...Commonweal 10 April 1992: 23...
...Economic inequity, which goes hand in hand with racial segregation, is the second major cause of the dual school system...
...However, because their tax base is so much poorer, they are likely to end up with far less money for each child in school...
...He shares his journey with us in Savage Inequalities...
...For example, the entire property wealth of Camden—$250 million— is less than the value of just one casino in Atlantic City...
...In the urban schools Kozol visited, 95 to 99 percent of the students were nonwhite...
...Louis, high schools have to be closed when sewage flows into the kitchens and the student bathrooms...
...Louis, but their gifts are lost to poverty and turmoil and the damage done by knowing they are written off by their society...
...They have no feeling of belonging to America...
...He writes, "about injustice most poor children in America cannot be fooled...
...in New York, four kindergartens and a sixth-grade class of Spanish-speaking children are packed into a single, windowless room...
...Parents in Montgomery would riot...
...Louis schools, observes, "Gifted children are everywhere in East St...
Vol. 119 • April 1992 • No. 7
