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Jessica's Reviews > Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
by
by
3.5 stars. I know, I know, this is a well-known classic of nonfiction that has stood the test of time. And by no means do I disagree with his premise — since the time that I was in high school 15 years ago, I've been making the argument that funding public education with property taxes leads to entrenched inequalities, and that was without knowing the ways in which state and federal funding utterly fail to rectify the differences. But holy goodness, talk about beating a dead horse. This could have been a powerful magazine article or — if written 20 years later — an eminently shareable blog post. But instead we get a book that says basically the same thing over and over again for six chapters, until I could practically write a chapter myself.
"Take Big City X. At Poor Area High School, there is a large hole in the ceiling of the entryway. Most of the toilets don't work and there is no toilet paper. The gym is unusable because the flooring has been torn up, but due to overcrowding there are now four classes being held in there anyway. Class sizes average 35 students, and all the students are black and Hispanic. The library has about 200 books that are all from the 1960s and before. The graduation rate is about 50% and only about 50 students of 5000 will apply to college.
"Five minutes down the street / across the tracks / up the hill is Rich Area High School. It has six gyms and a 'study lounge' and a 'music suite.' Students can take classes in 'geology' and 'music theory' and 'obscure literature of the 17th century.' Class sizes average 18 students, and the student body is 90% white and 9% Asian, with three black kids who are in all remedial classes. The library has 20,000 volumes, and 99% of students graduate, many going to Ivy League schools. Whereas Poor Area High School spends $1,000 per pupil, Rich Area High School spends $10,000."
Don't get me wrong — it's important to draw attention to the degree of disparity that exists. And I'm glad Kozol has done so in such sharp contrast. But I don't need a rinse and repeat in ten different cities to get the point.
What Kozol does do well is to show just how entitled and racist white suburban parents can be when it comes to trying to rectify these disparities. From protests to court cases, anytime major action has been taken to try to give poor districts enough money to function decently, all the rich people get up in arms about the "Robin Hoods" who are trying to make their precious children mediocre. Kozol talks in unflinching terms about how affluent white Americans believe that education is adequate for poor minority children as long as it teaches them enough basics to hold down a minimum-wage job, even going so far as to imply that they are so uncultured that they wouldn't know what to do even if they had better facilities and so innately stupid that they wouldn't learn anything from better teachers.
It's hard to read, even more so because I know it to be true from my own experience. Kozol highlights New Trier High as the cream of the crop in the Chicago suburbs, but that's probably only because my high school hadn't been built yet. When it was, it was the most expensive high school to be built in the state. And while I'm grateful for the education I received, I hate the idea that it came at the expense (literally) of other students in other parts of the state. But even my very liberal mother disagreed with me on this, telling me that they paid to live in an expensive area so I could have the education I did, as if those born into poverty, whose children are born into poverty, just decided not to make the same "choice." Kozol returns to this idea of choice again and again, because it's an argument used often to assert that districts should retain control of their own schools from top to bottom so that "local choice" can play a role in how the school is designed. But as Kozol points out, the only choice that the poorest districts have is "negative choice": deciding whether to do without a nurse or a counselor, a gym or a lunchroom.
So I'm fully on board with Kozol's thesis, and I think that he makes his points well, even if he does it ad nauseam. But the other thing that grated on me the entire time I was reading was Kozol's writing style. He quotes a lot of people — so much so that at times it felt like passages were just strung-together quotations — but some of them get names and some of them don't, and there's rarely an explanation given for the difference (e.g., "a teacher said on condition of anonymity"). In at least one spot (p. 216) there's an entire paragraph in quotes that's given no context whatsoever (though this may have been a Kindle formatting error). And many of the people are quoted as speaking in multiple, uninterrupted paragraphs, making many of the same points and using the same language that Kozol uses in his narrative, which makes me think either they were highly edited or Kozol was just scribbling notes in a notebook and then reconstructed them into sentences later. This is in sharp contrast to the way he quotes written materials, where he denotes any kind of editing with ellipses, including oftentimes, unnecessarily, at the end of a passage. And some quotations are just baffling, such as, "Morris High School in the South Bronx, for example, says a teacher who has taught here more than 20 years, 'does everything an inanimate object can do to keep children from being educated.'" Who is speaking? The building?
Finally, I appreciate what Kozol was doing with his narrow focus on funding — and indeed, he argues well that those who say money doesn't make a difference are the same people not willing to redistribute any of their own money —but I also think he could have taken some of the space he used reiterating the same things over and over again and devoted it to a broader view of the factors that go into a quality education. He argues that giving districts more money, for example, would allow them to attract higher quality teachers, but I know from reading Radical: Fighting to Put Students First that there are other factors at play; when Michelle Rhee got outside funding to attract a huge number of would-be instructors in New York City, she discovered that there were hiring regulations and timelines that were stifling the recruitment within cities and losing many candidates to the suburbs. And I know from my own experience that being in a well-funded high school by no means guarantees quality teachers who understand their subject matter. (Kozol does make the point that affluent areas can better deal with a handful of poor teachers because they can afford tutoring for their kids, but he doesn't seem to believe that teachers in poorer districts would need to be held to any kind of standard as long as we could pay them more.)
Despite my problems with the book, I do see why it's considered a seminal work on this topic, and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't already spent the better part of two decades thinking and arguing about this very thing. I doubt he's changed the minds of anyone who already had a firm stance going in, but for anyone who's never given much thought to disparities in public education funding, this is definitely worth reading as an introduction.
"Take Big City X. At Poor Area High School, there is a large hole in the ceiling of the entryway. Most of the toilets don't work and there is no toilet paper. The gym is unusable because the flooring has been torn up, but due to overcrowding there are now four classes being held in there anyway. Class sizes average 35 students, and all the students are black and Hispanic. The library has about 200 books that are all from the 1960s and before. The graduation rate is about 50% and only about 50 students of 5000 will apply to college.
"Five minutes down the street / across the tracks / up the hill is Rich Area High School. It has six gyms and a 'study lounge' and a 'music suite.' Students can take classes in 'geology' and 'music theory' and 'obscure literature of the 17th century.' Class sizes average 18 students, and the student body is 90% white and 9% Asian, with three black kids who are in all remedial classes. The library has 20,000 volumes, and 99% of students graduate, many going to Ivy League schools. Whereas Poor Area High School spends $1,000 per pupil, Rich Area High School spends $10,000."
Don't get me wrong — it's important to draw attention to the degree of disparity that exists. And I'm glad Kozol has done so in such sharp contrast. But I don't need a rinse and repeat in ten different cities to get the point.
What Kozol does do well is to show just how entitled and racist white suburban parents can be when it comes to trying to rectify these disparities. From protests to court cases, anytime major action has been taken to try to give poor districts enough money to function decently, all the rich people get up in arms about the "Robin Hoods" who are trying to make their precious children mediocre. Kozol talks in unflinching terms about how affluent white Americans believe that education is adequate for poor minority children as long as it teaches them enough basics to hold down a minimum-wage job, even going so far as to imply that they are so uncultured that they wouldn't know what to do even if they had better facilities and so innately stupid that they wouldn't learn anything from better teachers.
It's hard to read, even more so because I know it to be true from my own experience. Kozol highlights New Trier High as the cream of the crop in the Chicago suburbs, but that's probably only because my high school hadn't been built yet. When it was, it was the most expensive high school to be built in the state. And while I'm grateful for the education I received, I hate the idea that it came at the expense (literally) of other students in other parts of the state. But even my very liberal mother disagreed with me on this, telling me that they paid to live in an expensive area so I could have the education I did, as if those born into poverty, whose children are born into poverty, just decided not to make the same "choice." Kozol returns to this idea of choice again and again, because it's an argument used often to assert that districts should retain control of their own schools from top to bottom so that "local choice" can play a role in how the school is designed. But as Kozol points out, the only choice that the poorest districts have is "negative choice": deciding whether to do without a nurse or a counselor, a gym or a lunchroom.
So I'm fully on board with Kozol's thesis, and I think that he makes his points well, even if he does it ad nauseam. But the other thing that grated on me the entire time I was reading was Kozol's writing style. He quotes a lot of people — so much so that at times it felt like passages were just strung-together quotations — but some of them get names and some of them don't, and there's rarely an explanation given for the difference (e.g., "a teacher said on condition of anonymity"). In at least one spot (p. 216) there's an entire paragraph in quotes that's given no context whatsoever (though this may have been a Kindle formatting error). And many of the people are quoted as speaking in multiple, uninterrupted paragraphs, making many of the same points and using the same language that Kozol uses in his narrative, which makes me think either they were highly edited or Kozol was just scribbling notes in a notebook and then reconstructed them into sentences later. This is in sharp contrast to the way he quotes written materials, where he denotes any kind of editing with ellipses, including oftentimes, unnecessarily, at the end of a passage. And some quotations are just baffling, such as, "Morris High School in the South Bronx, for example, says a teacher who has taught here more than 20 years, 'does everything an inanimate object can do to keep children from being educated.'" Who is speaking? The building?
Finally, I appreciate what Kozol was doing with his narrow focus on funding — and indeed, he argues well that those who say money doesn't make a difference are the same people not willing to redistribute any of their own money —but I also think he could have taken some of the space he used reiterating the same things over and over again and devoted it to a broader view of the factors that go into a quality education. He argues that giving districts more money, for example, would allow them to attract higher quality teachers, but I know from reading Radical: Fighting to Put Students First that there are other factors at play; when Michelle Rhee got outside funding to attract a huge number of would-be instructors in New York City, she discovered that there were hiring regulations and timelines that were stifling the recruitment within cities and losing many candidates to the suburbs. And I know from my own experience that being in a well-funded high school by no means guarantees quality teachers who understand their subject matter. (Kozol does make the point that affluent areas can better deal with a handful of poor teachers because they can afford tutoring for their kids, but he doesn't seem to believe that teachers in poorer districts would need to be held to any kind of standard as long as we could pay them more.)
Despite my problems with the book, I do see why it's considered a seminal work on this topic, and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't already spent the better part of two decades thinking and arguing about this very thing. I doubt he's changed the minds of anyone who already had a firm stance going in, but for anyone who's never given much thought to disparities in public education funding, this is definitely worth reading as an introduction.
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Quotes Jessica Liked
“This degree of equanimity in failure, critics note, has led most affluent parents in Chicago to avoid the public system altogether. The school board president in 1989, although a teacher and administrator in the system for three decades, did not send his children to the public schools. Nor does Mayor Richard Daley, Jr., nor did any of the previous four mayors who had school-age children. “Nobody in his right mind,” says one of the city’s aldermen “would send [his] kids to public school.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“Equity, after all, does not mean simply equal funding. Equal funding for unequal needs is not equality.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“Many people, even those who view themselves as liberals on other issues, tend to grow indignant, even rather agitated, if invited to look closely at these inequalities. “Life isn’t fair,” one parent in Winnetka answered flatly when I pressed the matter. “Wealthy children also go to summer camp. All summer. Poor kids maybe not at all. Or maybe, if they’re lucky, for two weeks. Wealthy children have the chance to go to Europe and they have the access to good libraries, encyclopedias, computers, better doctors, nicer homes. Some of my neighbors send their kids to schools like Exeter and Groton. Is government supposed to equalize these things as well?”
But government, of course, does not assign us to our homes, our summer camps, our doctors—or to Exeter. It does assign us to our public schools. Indeed, it forces us to go to them. Unless we have the wealth to pay for private education, we are compelled by law to go to public school—and to the public school in our district. Thus the state, by requiring attendance but refusing to require equity, effectively requires inequality. Compulsory inequity, perpetuated by state law, too frequently condemns our children to unequal lives.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
But government, of course, does not assign us to our homes, our summer camps, our doctors—or to Exeter. It does assign us to our public schools. Indeed, it forces us to go to them. Unless we have the wealth to pay for private education, we are compelled by law to go to public school—and to the public school in our district. Thus the state, by requiring attendance but refusing to require equity, effectively requires inequality. Compulsory inequity, perpetuated by state law, too frequently condemns our children to unequal lives.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“School boards think that, if they offer the same printed information to all parents, they have made choice equally accessible. That is not true, of course, because the printed information won’t be read, or certainly will not be scrutinized aggressively, by parents who can’t read or who read very poorly. But, even if a city could contrive a way to get the basic facts disseminated widely, can it disseminate audacity as well? Can it disseminate the limitless horizons of the middle class to those who have been trained to keep their eyes close to ground?”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“Placing the burden on the individual to break down doors in finding better education for a child is attractive to conservatives because it reaffirms their faith in individual ambition and autonomy. But to ask an individual to break down doors that we have chained and bolted in advance of his arrival is unfair.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“One cannot dispute the fact that giving poor black adolescents job skills, if it is self-evident that they do not possess the academic skills to go to college, is a good thing in itself. But the business leaders who put emphasis on filling entry-level job slots are too frequently the people who, by prior lobbying and voting patterns and their impact upon social policy, have made it all but certain that few of these urban kids would get the education in their early years that would have made them look like college prospects by their secondary years. First we circumscribe their destinies and then we look at the diminished product and we say, “Let’s be pragmatic and do with them what we can.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“A balancing act of equally unlikely options was the only answer that the city and the nation gave to the requests of these poor people. This juggling of options—in this instance, countering school-funding efforts with the need for preschool—does no good if neither of these options is to be enacted anyway and if the act of balancing only serves to guarantee our permanent inaction in both areas.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“One would not have thought that children in America would ever have to choose between a teacher or a playground or sufficient toilet paper. Like grain in a time of famine, the immense resources which the nation does in fact possess go not to the child in the greatest need but to the child of the highest bidder—the child of parents who, more frequently than not, have also enjoyed the same abundance when they were schoolchildren.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“The report by the Community Service Society cites an official of the New York City Board of Education who remarks that there is “no point” in putting further money “into some poor districts” because, in his belief, “new teachers would not stay there.” But the report observes that, in an instance where beginning teacher salaries were raised by nearly half, “that problem largely disappeared”—another interesting reminder of the difference money makes when we are willing to invest it. Nonetheless, says the report, “the perception that the poorest districts are beyond help still remains.…” Perhaps the worst result of such beliefs, says the report, is the message that resources would be “wasted on poor children.” This message “trickles down to districts, schools, and classrooms.” Children hear and understand this theme—they are poor investments—and behave accordingly. If society’s resources would be wasted on their destinies, perhaps their own determination would be wasted too. “Expectations are a powerful force …,” the CSS observes.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“If there were a multitude of schools almost as good as these in every city, so that applicants for high school could select from dozens of good options—so that even parents who did not have the sophistication or connections to assist their children in obtaining entrance to selective schools would not see their kids attending truly bad schools, since there would be none—then it would do little harm if certain of these schools were even better than the rest. In such a situation, kids who couldn’t be admitted to a famous school such as Bronx Science might be jealous of the ones who did get in, but would not, for this reason, be condemned to third-rate education and would not be written off by the society.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“When a school board hires just one woman to retrieve 400 missing children from the streets of the North Bronx, we may reasonably conclude that it does not particularly desire to find them. If 100 of these children startled us by showing up at school, moreover, there would be no room for them in P.S. 94. The building couldn’t hold them.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“In effect, a circular phenomenon evolves: The richer districts—those in which the property lots and houses are more highly valued—have more revenue, derived from taxing land and homes, to fund their public schools. The reputation of the schools, in turn, adds to the value of their homes, and this, in turn, expands the tax base for their public schools. The fact that they can levy lower taxes than the poorer districts, but exact more money, raises values even more; and this, again, means further funds for smaller classes and for higher teacher salaries within their public schools. Few of the children in the schools of Roosevelt or Mount Vernon will, as a result, be likely to compete effectively with kids in Great Neck and Manhasset for admissions to the better local colleges and universities of New York state. Even fewer will compete for more exclusive Ivy League admissions. And few of the graduates or dropouts of those poorer systems, as a consequence, are likely ever to earn enough to buy a home in Great Neck or Manhasset.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“A polarization of this issue, whereby some insist upon the primacy of school, others upon the primacy of family and neighborhood, obscures the fact that both are elemental forces in the lives of children.
The family, however, differs from the school in the significant respect that government is not responsible, or at least not directly, for the inequalities of family background. It is responsible for inequalities in public education.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
The family, however, differs from the school in the significant respect that government is not responsible, or at least not directly, for the inequalities of family background. It is responsible for inequalities in public education.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“There is a parallel in this to arguments that we have heard in New York City in regard to health facilities that serve the rich and poor. There, too, we were told by doctors that the more exhaustive services provided to rich patients may not represent superior health care but a form of “overutilization”—again the theory of “diminishing returns.” But here again it is not argued that the rich should therefore be denied this luxury, if that is what it is, but only that it shouldn’t be extended to poor people. Affluent people, it has often been observed, seldom lack for arguments to deny to others the advantages that they enjoy. But it is going a step further for the Wall Street Journal to pretend that they are not advantages.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“The usual reduction in class size,” says the Journal—from 30 to 24, for instance—“isn’t enough to make a difference.” If this were really true, and if the Journal wanted to help the poorest children of Chicago, the logical solution would appear to be to cut their class size even more—perhaps to 17, as in Winnetka. This is a change that even the Journal’s editors concede to be worthwhile. But this is a degree of equity the Journal does not entertain. It contemplates a minor change and then concludes that it would make only a minor difference.
In actual fact, as every teacher of small children knows, the difference even from 30 kids to 24 would be a blessing in most cases, if some other needed changes came at the same time. But the Journal does not speak of several changes. The search is for the one change that will cost the least and bring the best return. “Changing parent values” is the ideal answer to this search because, if it were possible, it would cost nothing and, since it isn’t really possible, it doesn’t even need to be attempted. Isolating one thing and then telling us that this alone won’t do much good and, for this reason, ought not to be tried, is a way of saying that the children of the poor will have to choose one out of seven things rich children take for granted—and then, as a kind of final curse upon their dreams, that any one of those seven things will not make a difference. Why not offer them all seven things?”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
In actual fact, as every teacher of small children knows, the difference even from 30 kids to 24 would be a blessing in most cases, if some other needed changes came at the same time. But the Journal does not speak of several changes. The search is for the one change that will cost the least and bring the best return. “Changing parent values” is the ideal answer to this search because, if it were possible, it would cost nothing and, since it isn’t really possible, it doesn’t even need to be attempted. Isolating one thing and then telling us that this alone won’t do much good and, for this reason, ought not to be tried, is a way of saying that the children of the poor will have to choose one out of seven things rich children take for granted—and then, as a kind of final curse upon their dreams, that any one of those seven things will not make a difference. Why not offer them all seven things?”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“A physical education expert, asked to visit a grade school in East Orange, is astonished to be told that jump ropes are in short supply and that the children therefore have to jump “in groups.” Basketball courts, however, “are in abundance” in these schools, the visitor says, because the game involves little expense.
Defendants in a recent suit brought by the parents of schoolchildren in New Jersey’s poorest districts claimed that differences like these, far from being offensive, should be honored as the consequence of “local choice”—the inference being that local choice in urban schools elects to let black children gravitate to basketball. But this “choice”—which feeds one of the most intransigent myths about black teen-age boys—is determined by the lack of other choices. Children in East Orange cannot choose to play lacrosse or soccer, or to practice modern dance, on fields or in dance studios they do not have; nor can they keep their bodies clean in showers that their schools cannot afford. Little children in East Orange do not choose to wait for 15 minutes for a chance to hold a jump rope.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
Defendants in a recent suit brought by the parents of schoolchildren in New Jersey’s poorest districts claimed that differences like these, far from being offensive, should be honored as the consequence of “local choice”—the inference being that local choice in urban schools elects to let black children gravitate to basketball. But this “choice”—which feeds one of the most intransigent myths about black teen-age boys—is determined by the lack of other choices. Children in East Orange cannot choose to play lacrosse or soccer, or to practice modern dance, on fields or in dance studios they do not have; nor can they keep their bodies clean in showers that their schools cannot afford. Little children in East Orange do not choose to wait for 15 minutes for a chance to hold a jump rope.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“East Side High became well known some years ago when its former principal, a colorful and controversial figure named Joe Clark, was given special praise by U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett. Bennett called the school “a mecca of education” and paid tribute to Joe Clark for throwing out 300 students who were thought to be involved with violence or drugs.
“He was a perfect hero,” says a school official who has dinner with me the next evening, “for an age in which the ethos was to cut down on the carrots and increase the sticks. The day that Bennett made his visit, Clark came out and walked the hallways with a bullhorn and a bat. If you didn’t know he was a principal, you would have thought he was the warden of a jail. Bennett created Joe Clark as a hero for white people. He was on the cover of Time magazine. Parents and kids were held in thrall after the president endorsed him.
“In certain respects, this set a pattern for the national agenda. Find black principals who don’t identify with civil rights concerns but are prepared to whip black children into line. Throw out the kids who cause you trouble. It’s an easy way to raise the average scores. Where do you put these kids once they’re expelled? You build more prisons. Two thirds of the kids that Clark threw out are in Passaic County Jail.
“This is a very popular approach in the United States today. Don’t provide the kids with a new building. Don’t provide them with more teachers or more books or more computers. Don’t even breathe a whisper of desegregation. Keep them in confinement so they can’t subvert the education of the suburbs. Don’t permit them ‘frills’ like art or poetry or theater. Carry a bat and tell them they’re no good if they can’t pass the state exam. Then, when they are ruined, throw them into prison. Will it surprise you to be told that Paterson destroyed a library because it needed space to build a jail?”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“He was a perfect hero,” says a school official who has dinner with me the next evening, “for an age in which the ethos was to cut down on the carrots and increase the sticks. The day that Bennett made his visit, Clark came out and walked the hallways with a bullhorn and a bat. If you didn’t know he was a principal, you would have thought he was the warden of a jail. Bennett created Joe Clark as a hero for white people. He was on the cover of Time magazine. Parents and kids were held in thrall after the president endorsed him.
“In certain respects, this set a pattern for the national agenda. Find black principals who don’t identify with civil rights concerns but are prepared to whip black children into line. Throw out the kids who cause you trouble. It’s an easy way to raise the average scores. Where do you put these kids once they’re expelled? You build more prisons. Two thirds of the kids that Clark threw out are in Passaic County Jail.
“This is a very popular approach in the United States today. Don’t provide the kids with a new building. Don’t provide them with more teachers or more books or more computers. Don’t even breathe a whisper of desegregation. Keep them in confinement so they can’t subvert the education of the suburbs. Don’t permit them ‘frills’ like art or poetry or theater. Carry a bat and tell them they’re no good if they can’t pass the state exam. Then, when they are ruined, throw them into prison. Will it surprise you to be told that Paterson destroyed a library because it needed space to build a jail?”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“It has recently become a matter of some interest to the press and to some academic experts to determine whether it is race or class that is the major factor in denial of these children. The question always strikes me as a scholar’s luxury. To kindergarten children in the schools of Paterson or Camden, it can hardly matter very much to know if the denial they experience is caused by their skin color or their destitution.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“Phone calls aired on several radio stations voice a raw contempt for the capacities of urban children (“money will not help these children”) but predict the imminent demise of education in the richer districts if their funding is cut back. Money, the message seems to be, is crucial to rich districts but will be of little difference to the poor.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“This, then, is the dread that seems to lie beneath the fear of equalizing. Equity is seen as dispossession. Local autonomy is seen as liberty--even if the poverty of those in nearby cities robs them of all meaningful autonomy by narrowing their choices to the meanest and the shabbiest of options. In this way, defendants in these cases seem to polarize two of the principles that lie close to the origins of this republic. Liberty and equity are seen as antibodies to each other.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“It is a matter of national pride that every child’s ship be kept afloat. Otherwise our nation would be subject to the charge that we deny poor children public school. But what is now encompassed by the one word (“school”) are two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance and intention, serve entirely different roles. Both are needed for our nation’s governance. But children in one set of schools are educated to be governors; children in the other set of schools are trained for being governed. The former are given the imaginative range to mobilize ideas for economic growth; the latter are provided with the discipline to do the narrow tasks the first group will prescribe.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“Now and then, in private, affluent suburbanites concede that certain aspects of the game may be a trifle rigged to their advantage. “Sure, it’s a bit unjust,” they may concede, “but that’s reality and that’s the way the game is played.…
“In any case,” they sometimes add in a refrain that we have heard now many times, “there’s no real evidence that spending money makes much difference in the outcome of a child’s education. We have it. So we spend it. But it’s probably a secondary matter. Other factors—family and background—seem to be a great deal more important.”
In these ways they fend off dangers of disturbing introspection; and this, in turn, enables them to give their children something far more precious than the simple gift of pedagogic privilege. They give them uncontaminated satisfaction in their victories.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“In any case,” they sometimes add in a refrain that we have heard now many times, “there’s no real evidence that spending money makes much difference in the outcome of a child’s education. We have it. So we spend it. But it’s probably a secondary matter. Other factors—family and background—seem to be a great deal more important.”
In these ways they fend off dangers of disturbing introspection; and this, in turn, enables them to give their children something far more precious than the simple gift of pedagogic privilege. They give them uncontaminated satisfaction in their victories.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“Competition at the local high school, said another Great Neck parent, was “unhealthy.” He described the toll it took on certain students. “Children in New York may suffer from too little. Many of our children suffer from too much.” The loss of distinctions in these statements serves to blur the differences between the inescapable unhappiness of being human and the needless misery created by injustice. It also frees the wealthy from the obligation to concede the difference between inconvenience and destruction.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“Placing a black person in control of an essentially apartheid system—whether that system is a city or its welfare apparatus or its public schools—seems to serve at least three functions. It offers symbolism that protects the white society against the charges of racism. It offers enforcement, since a black official is expected to be even more severe in putting down unrest than white officials. It offers scapegoats: When the situation is unchanged, he or she may be condemned, depending on the situation, for corruption or ineptitude or lack of vision, for too much (or for too little) flair or energy or passion.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“Equal funding is opposed for opposite reasons: either because it won’t improve or benefit the poorer schools—not “necessarily,” the governor’s assistant says—or because it would improve and benefit those schools but would be subtracting something from the other districts, and the other districts view this as unjust.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“When low-income districts go to court to challenge the existing system of school funding, writes John Coons, the natural fear of the conservative is “that the levelers are at work here sapping the foundations of free enterprise.”
In reality, he says, there is “no graver threat to the capitalist system than the present cyclical replacement of the ‘fittest’ of one generation by their artificially advantaged offspring. Worse, when that advantage is proffered to the children of the successful by the state, we can be sure that free enterprise has sold its birthright.… To defend the present public school finance system on a platform of economic or political freedom is no less absurd than to describe it as egalitarian. In the name of all the values of free enterprise, the existing system [is] a scandal.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
In reality, he says, there is “no graver threat to the capitalist system than the present cyclical replacement of the ‘fittest’ of one generation by their artificially advantaged offspring. Worse, when that advantage is proffered to the children of the successful by the state, we can be sure that free enterprise has sold its birthright.… To defend the present public school finance system on a platform of economic or political freedom is no less absurd than to describe it as egalitarian. In the name of all the values of free enterprise, the existing system [is] a scandal.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“If Americans had to discriminate directly against other people’s children, I believe most citizens would find this morally abhorrent. Denial, in an active sense, of other people’s children is, however, rarely necessary in this nation. Inequality is mediated for us by a taxing system that most people do not fully understand and seldom scrutinize.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“Liberty, school conservatives have argued, is diminished when the local powers of school districts have been sacrificed to centralized control. The opposition to desegregation in the South, for instance, was portrayed as local (states’) rights as a sacred principle infringed upon by federal court decisions. The opposition to the drive for equal funding in a given state is now portrayed as local (district) rights in opposition to the powers of the state. While local control may be defended and supported on a number of important grounds, it is unmistakable that it has been historically advanced to counter equity demands; this is no less the case today.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“Research experts want to know what can be done about the values of poor segregated children; and this is a question that needs asking. But they do not ask what can be done about the values of the people who have segregated these communities. There is no academic study of the pathological detachment of the very rich...”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“According to our textbook rhetoric, Americans abhor the notion of a social order in which economic privilege and political power are determined by hereditary class. Officially, we have a more enlightened goal in sight: namely, a society in which a family’s wealth has no relation to the probability of future educational attainment and the wealth and station it affords. By this standard, education offered to poor children should be at least as good as that which is provided to the children of the upper-middle class.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
“The Ann Arbor superintendent ridicules what he describes as “simple-minded solutions [that attempt] to make things equal.” But, of course, the need is not “to make things equal.” He would be correct to call this “simple-minded.” Funding and resources should be equal to the needs that children face. The children of Detroit have greater needs than those of children in Ann Arbor. They should get more than children in Ann Arbor, more than kids in Bloomfield Hills or Birmingham. Calling ethics “simple-minded” is consistent with the tendency to label obvious solutions, that might cost us something, unsophisticated and to favor more diffuse solutions that will cost us nothing and, in any case, will not be implemented.”
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
― Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
Reading Progress
September 26, 2014
– Shelved
April 7, 2018
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Started Reading
April 12, 2018
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50.0%
April 13, 2018
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Finished Reading
