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Book: Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
Quotes of Book: Savage Inequalities: Children
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  1. Jonathan Kozol _ Savage Inequalities: Children

    We are preparing a generation of robots. Kids are learning exclusively through rote. We have children who are given no conceptual framework. They do not learn to think, because their teachers are straitjacketed by tests that measure only isolated skills. As a result, they can be given no electives, nothing wonderful or fanciful or beautiful, nothing that touches the spirit or the soul.
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  2. Jonathan Kozol _ Savage Inequalities: Children

    The struggle being waged today, where there is any struggle being waged at all, is closer to the one that was addressed in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court accepted segregated institutions for black people, stipulating only that they must be equal to those open to white people. The dual society, at least in public education, seems in general to be unquestioned.
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  3. Jonathan Kozol _ Savage Inequalities: Children

    The New Jersey constitution, says the court in its decision, requires that all students be provided with "an opportunity to compete fairly for a place in our society.… Pole vaulters using bamboo poles even with the greatest effort cannot compete with pole vaulters using aluminum poles.
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  4. Jonathan Kozol _ Savage Inequalities: Children

    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.
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  5. Jonathan Kozol _ Savage Inequalities: Children

    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.
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  6. Jonathan Kozol _ Savage Inequalities: Children

    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?
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  7. Jonathan Kozol _ Savage Inequalities: Children

    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.
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  8. Jonathan Kozol _ Savage Inequalities: Children

    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.
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  9. Jonathan Kozol _ Savage Inequalities: Children

    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.
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  10. Jonathan Kozol _ Savage Inequalities: Children

    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.
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  11. Jonathan Kozol _ Savage Inequalities: Children

    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.
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  12. Jonathan Kozol _ Savage Inequalities: Children

    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 , 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.
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