Cutting Through Another Jungle

...There was talk about selling the city hall until a creditor got a judgment against thecity for it...

...even that each child be guaranteed up-to-date textbooks and basic supplies...

...Or where it is practical...

...perhaps impossible ??”to follow the course of action the author advocates...

...People who favor the change invariably assume that everybody's funding will be raised to the level of the best schools, but that hasn't happened so far and is hardly probable in these difficult economic times...

...The schools are what a place like East St...

...In California attempts at equalization were successful, but they resulted in education spending being leveled down, not up...

...This is powerful stuff, made all the more powerful by Kozol's picture of the kids who are victimized...

...Nor can they be brushed aside in blind pursuit of the principle of absolute equality...

...That's for sure....Would you want to tell the children it is equal...

...We could do the same for youngsters by setting and enforcing minimum conditions that would insure against any child ever having to attend the kind of schools Kozol describes...

...The argument that privileged kids somehow deserve to have more because their parents are willing to pay higher taxes enrages Kozol...

...Kozol shows that the discrepancies between schools in Camden and Cherry Hill or Princeton are horrifying, and that in many instances the critical factor is how much money the school districts have available...

...Kids ride their bicycles along a dry creek bed so polluted that it "smokes by day and glows on moonless nights...

...Yet the constituency for developing such standards is greater than the one for total equalization...

...The experience of Governor Jim Florio in New Jersey is similarly instructive...

...Kozol visited schools in the poor areas of a number of urban centers...

...and we ??”should be ashamed...

...Here people are used to deciding how much they will spend on education, and they are used to differences among schools...

...Since wealthy communities can easily raise larger sums from property taxes than poor ones, he suggests a Robin Hood solution: Take from the rich and give to the poor...

...And while you're at it, enjoin the rich from raising extra money for their schools, even if they want to...

...in other words, spending the same amount of money (if not more) on schools in poor neighborhoods as in wealthy ones...

...disgruntled businesses and individual citizens might simply pick up and move to another state...

...He finds the injustice especially galling because we pride ourselves in this country on offering equality of opportunity, yet most students in the crumbling buildings are black or Hispanic...

...But should they be impelled to do something, they are likely to find it difficult...

...garbage hasn't been picked up since 1987...

...That is what we read about them in the newspapers, and perhaps the stories make it easier for us to ignore the whole sad situation...

...America's history of local schools supported by local taxes, however, has created a different set of expectations...

...Every student in that school is black...

...Even if every state opted for equalization we would not have total fairness, because some states invest more in education than others...

...It's like a terrible joke on history...

...Kozol believes equalization is the answer...

...Surely such measures are consistent with the Federal role in promoting equity in education, and do not constitute Federal control...

...The city itself, which has declared bankruptcy, is a wasteland...

...or to diminished support for public education...

...Indeed, applying those standards would spell an improvement for our worst-off schools...

...Calling these historically ingrained feelings selfish will not make them go away...

...But this, too, would run up against our tradition of local control and our fear of having public education dictated from Washington...

...as it would be in metropolitan New York City or Boston or Washington, D.C...

...They don't have absolute equality, but we have greatly improved their situation...

...Although this sounds like simple justice, given our tradition of school financing it can have some undesirable consequences...

...The squalor he found was disgraceful...

...Schools are supposed to be places where the playing field starts off level, where equal opportunity holds sway for all children, regardless of the circumstances they are born into...

...Rather, they...

...Moreover, true equalization within a state would certainly mean some kids getting less than they had before...

...the author asks...

...One model comes from Federal occupational health and safety standards...

...And even the most mean-spirited fiscal conservatives would be hard-pressed to argue that children should be forced to go to schools whose conditions are the educational equivalent of Sinclair's The Jungle...

...You have to think of the consequences...

...There are no businesses and no services...

...If the excellent schools in the Chicago suburb of New Trier and those near an inner-city housing project like Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes appear to come from different planets, that is nothing for folks in New Trier to be smug about...

...A child Kozol meets in East St...

...Louis can afford: They have science labs without water or lab tables, windows without glass, classes without books...

...Being in East St...

...Well, then, to hell with you...

...Equally outrageous was the contrast between these wretched places and the lavishly equipped suburban schools often only a few minutes drive away...

...The atmosphere is poisonous with fumes from two nearby chemical plants...

...Now we have policies that provide them with income maintenance and medical care...

...Louis, where Kozol begins his odyssey, is like being in hell...

...People who live where property values are high, he points out, can tax themselves at a much lower rate than people in urban ghettoes and still produce enough money to pay for opulent facilities...

...Wecould require that school buildings be up to code, that maximum occupancy laws for rooms be observed...

...Nevertheless, the Governor is now facing a majority Republican Legislature elected expressly to repeal the measures he advanced to bring about equalization in New Jersey...

...The only way to get equity for kids from poor states would be to turn over the regulation of education expenditure to the Federal government...

...Louis perceives the irony in naming one of the impoverished structures after Martin Luther King Jr.: "The school is full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains...

...Thus the idea of spending money on a school in another district is a little like giving foreign aid...

...Maybe if he had spread out the changes overaterm, or preferably two terms, he would have had better luck...

...We'll start our own schools...

...Still, saying we have a tradition in the funding of public education that is hostile to equalization is not the same as saying we can do nothing about the situation Kozol describes...

...As Kozol admits, the backlash against equalization produced Proposition 13, which capped property taxes...

...More than three-quarters of a century later, Jonathan Kozol has published a book about the disgusting conditions in the schools our poor children attend that ought to inspire similar outrage and action...

...It is easy for middle-class people to think of the students who go to places like Camden High School as violence-prone druggies, thieves and truants...

...Of course, it would cost money to implement the barest standards, and neither the Federal government nor the states are inclined to spend money these days...

...that was the case in California...

...The reality, therefore, couldlead to a tax revolt...

...Old people in this country used to die because they could not afford to buy enough food, let alone see a doctor...

...As it is, it looks as though he is going to lose everything he attempted, and nobody else is likely to try anything along those lines in New Jersey for a good long time...

...Kozol shows us the others: elementary school children who are neither violent nor on drugs and can't be blamed for neighborhood or school decay, and older kids who are still trying to learn in schools where conditions are so miserable that attendance is more like a punishment than an opportunity...

...Reviewed by Albert Shanker President, American Federation of Teachers In 1906, Upton Sinclair published a novel about the disgusting conditions in Chicago's meatpacking industry that shocked the nation and helped initiate a movement for health and safety standards...

...Stench-filled buildings where none of the equipment works and teachers have to bring paper for their kids to write on were only half the picture...

...Some parents work hard to buy a house in a particular community because they believe its schools are good...

...he is talking as well about the shocking inequality between their schools and the suburban schools where kids broadcast from their own television stations and swim in Olympic-sized pools...

...Florio took the right step, but he did not consider the consequences...

...and there was no question what they were going to be...

...Chicago, New York City, Camden, New Jersey, and San Antonio, Texas, were among them...

...teenagers who, when they come to school at all, tend to come armed with guns and beepers...

...This led to a big, across-the-board decline in school funding and, most people would agree, to a decline in the quality of education in California...

...It is also like a return to the days before Brown v. Board of Education...

...Where is our sense of "moral urgency" about this terrible injustice...

...Equal funding is taken for granted where national education systems exist, and in those countries little variation among schools is expected...

...But Kozol is not only talking about poor, inner-city youngsters who arebeing thrown away...

...Kozol asks a teacher whether we have gone back 100 years to separate but equal, and she replies, "It is separate...

...Parents might say, " We can't raise extra money to get what we want for our kids...

...Kozol's report on who wins and who loses in our educational system is so compelling that it will make many people feel very guilty...

...Savage Inequalities is not a novel...