Carl's Reviews > Savage Inequalities

Kozol does and should discompose suburban liberals like me. This extraordinarily thorough and compelling book goes far beyond suggesting that there is a problem with America's schooling and priorities; it delves deeply into statistics, causes, and, most powerfully, reasons why we have allowed the problem to persist. Spoiler alert: Americans don't come off looking particularly ethical or sensitive in this analysis.

That's good. This journey through East St. Louis, Chicago, New York City, Camden, Washington DC, and San Antonio blasts a spotlight on schools and communities that complacent Americans wish were invisible...or that we use racist tropes to rationalize away. Kozol is mad -- it's hard not to be -- but his tone is almost entirely rational and calm. His book's strength flows from the statistics and details, even more than that the awareness of counterarguments, and most of all the interviews with children and educators.

The most difficult point for him to make -- the one that should unsettle us all the most -- is that the problem in underfunded, abandoned poor, minority districts is exacerbated by the lovingly proper funding in other districts (like the one where I live and teach). In other words, this is not simply a cheerleaderly "Let's raise up the disenfranchised!" but more of a "The disenfranchised are disenfranchised because the enfranchised are enfranchised." Everyone can get behind the cheerleader; Kozol is asking us all to accept responsibility. As you can imagine, this didn't go down easily then and doesn't now.

The Camden chapter notes, "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. 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..." (177). The reader cringes, probably gets defensive; like some of the well-educated youngsters in Rye, NY, with whom Kozol engages in a vigorous discussion, the response is often something like What, do you want everyone to be mediocre?

This is a story about racism and segregation. Those kids in Rye agree that equity a moral goal to be desired but believe -- as many suburbanites, liberal and conservative alike, would say -- equity probably wouldn't make much difference because poor children "would still lack the motivation" and "fail...because of other problems" (126). Kozol writes of the Rye teenagers:

The children are lucid and their language is well chosen and their arguments well made, but there is a sense that they are dealing with an issue that does not feel very vivid, and that nothing that we say about it to each other really matters since it's "just a theoretical discussion." To a certain degree, the skillfulness and cleverness that they display seem to derive precisely from this sense of unreality. Questions of unfairness feel more like a geometric problem than a matter of humanity or conscience. A few of the students do break through the note of unreality, but, when they do, they cease to be so agile in their use of words and speak more awkwardly. Ethical challenges seem to threaten their effectiveness. There is the sense that they were skating over ice and that the issues we addressed were safely frozen underneath. When they stop to look beneath the ice they start to stumble. The verbal competence they have acquired here may have been gained by building walls around some regions of the heart. (126-7)

And later on that page:

"I don't think that busing students from their ghetto to a different school would do much good," one student says. "You can take them out of the environment, but you can't take the environment out of them. If someone grows up in the South Bronx, he's not going to be prone to learn....Busing didn't work when it was tried," he says. I ask him how he knows this and he says he saw a television documentary movie about Boston. (127)

"Keep them where they are but make it equal," as another Rye student says (127), wraps up the scene. It's classic Kozol: analytical, probing, insightful, unsatisfied with cliches and platitudes, empathetic of all but unwilling to let any off the hook. If the reader is not at least somewhat unsettled here, the reader lacks a heart.

Indeed, Kozol's other great strength is the compassion with which he writes about those who suffer in these degraded environments: living in what is effectively a chemical dumping ground in East St. Louis, going to schools with holes in walls and ceilings and tattered books that have to be shared, dealing with teachers who have given up, attending class in tiny and unpleasant rooms. After descriptions of overcrowding throughout the Camden chapter, as they are in every chapter, he unwinds this passage that epitomize his more editorial moments:

The crowding of children into insufficient, often squalid spaces seems an inexplicable anomaly in the United States. Images of spaciousness and majesty, of endless plains and soaring mountains, fill our folklore and our music and the anthems that our children sing. "This land is your land," they are told; and, in one of the patriotic songs that children truly love because it summons up so well the goodness and the optimism of the nation at its best, they sing of "good" and "brotherhood" "from sea to shining sea." It is a betrayal of the best things that we value when poor children are obliged to sing these songs in storerooms and coat closets. (159-60)

Whew. The myth of America takes a beating in this book. It's hard to see how that is undeserved.

It may be due to the changes in standardized testing over the twenty-four years since this was published that Kozol's obloquy against that particular hazard seemed less convincing to me than any of his other points. He is, however, on point in suggesting that the teaching to which these inner-city kids are subjected is the least imaginative to be found, largely because of the desperate need to stay with nostrils above the crashing waves. Maslow's hierarchy would tell us that.

The core of this essential book is Kozol's thesis that education is a fundamental right, and that the nation has abrogated its responsibility toward the members of these communities with regard to that right. "How much does a person have the right to ask?" (195). More than they are getting.

The contest between liberty and equity in education has, in the past 30 years, translated into the competing claims of local control, on the one hand, and state (or federal) intervention on the other. 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. (210)

Today as well. Woe to us if we don't heed Jonathan Kozol.