There are certain patterns in Jonathan Kozol’s half-century of writing about America’s failure to adequately educate poor black and Hispanic children, which began with “Death at an Early Age,” a poignant account of his year teaching in its public schools. Boston.
Dilapidated school buildings with cramped bathrooms and leaking ceilings. Students flattered by scripted curricula and endless test prep. Bleak urban neighborhoods with neglected parks, dilapidated apartments and underpaid teachers. Despair is punctuated by bright and lively children who bluntly point out the obvious injustice that adults have been trained to overlook.
Death at an Early Age, published in 1967, turned him into the kind of widely read public intellectual that no longer existed.
Now, at 87, he has published “An End to Inequality,” his 15th book — and his last, he says. It is an unapologetic cri de coeur about the shortcomings of schools serving poor black and Hispanic children, and therefore, the nation’s moral failure to end the inequality it has documented for decades.
Critics have long said that Mr. Kozol has focused too much on all that is wrong with American public schooling and not enough on models of success. They point to charter schools, gifted principals and early reading programs driving change, even in some deeply segregated neighborhoods.
But Mr Kozol characterizes them as marginal reforms meant to plug into a system that is unequal by design. And in his long career, he has seen decades of national reform efforts — “A Nation at Risk,” No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds — come and go, while some problems remain much the same.
Educational opportunities are still distributed primarily by parents’ ability to pay for housing in desirable zip codes. Some aging school buildings are still filled with lead. Black and Latino students are still disproportionately subjected to harsh forms of discipline: silent hallways, isolation closets, even physical restraint.
“I’m not trembling with forced optimism right now,” Mr. Kozol said in an interview. “If we’re talking about black and Latino kids in our public schools, I think it’s unrealistic to be optimistic.”
He spoke from an armchair in the living room of his canary yellow colonial house in Cambridge, Mass., where he lives alone, with the help of several young assistants. He was briefly married and divorced in the 1970s and had no children, devoting years to compelling reporting. He spent his days inside schools and homeless shelters and wrote by hand late into the night — still his favorite time to work, he said, as he sipped an iced coffee at dusk.
The room was filled with teddy bears—he started collecting them when he became too incapacitated to care for the dogs—and old issues of left-wing magazines like The Nation and The Progressive. A nearby coffee table was piled with memorabilia, arranged for a possible acquisition, Mr. Kozol said, of his papers from the New York Public Library.
They included a signed photograph of Langston Hughes, which the poet sent in 1965 after Mr. Kozol, then 28, was fired for teaching a class of mostly black fourth-graders Mr. Hughes’s poem “The Landlord’s Ballad” — at the time it was seen as a subversive work by Boston administrators.
In “An End to Inequality,” Mr. Kozol uses bold language to make his point.
He rejects the idea, popular in some education circles, that focusing on the problems of racially segregated public schools is encouraging a kind of deficit mentality, in which black, Latino, and Native American children are seen more for what they lack than for what they do. resistant.
“It is a delicate dilemma,” writes Mr. Kozol. “If we can’t talk about victims, if the word is out of favor, what other language can be used to talk about children who face cognitive suppression in almost every aspect of instruction?”
He continues, “Then, too, if there are no victims, then no crime has been committed. If no crime has been committed, there can be no reason to demand restitution for what these children go through in their exclusion schools. Avoiding an unfavorable word cannot make reality disappear.”
The solution, he argues, is still the yellow school bus, which transports poor children to opportunities in more affluent neighborhoods and cities, where they can learn alongside upper-middle-class peers and enjoy some of the advantages afforded them by their parents: rich arts programs, language classes, science labs, living libraries.
Instead, the system we have is nothing short of “apartheid,” writes Mr. Kozol. The persistence of lead paint and pipes in the schools of poor children is “brain genocide,” he adds, and the budget cuts are evidence of a “war on public schools.”
Mr. Kozol, who grew up the son of a doctor and a social worker in the affluent Boston suburb of Newton, credits Archibald MacLeish, the modernist poet who taught him at Harvard, with helping him develop his writing style.
“He encouraged me to use strong words,” he recalls. “There is a tendency to suppose that the extremes of expression are always wrong, and that truth, by its own preference, wants to live in the middle. It doesn’t always stay in the middle.”
After college and a stint as a failed novelist in Paris, Mr. Kozol had planned to earn a Ph.D. in literature.
His life changed in 1964, when civil rights activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Mississippi.
What am I doing here, he remembered thinking, hanging out in Cambridge talking about the metaphysical poetry of John Donne?
Soon after, she was teaching in Roxbury, a predominantly black neighborhood in Boston, and organizing with parents who wanted to enroll their children in higher-quality schools, first in Boston and eventually in the suburbs.
Their activism helped create a volunteer bus program called METCO, which still exists today, transporting 3,000 students a year from Boston to suburban schools. Research shows that students accepted into the program earn higher test scores and have better college and career outcomes than students who apply to METCO but do not win a spot in the random lottery.
The big idea in Mr. Kozol’s new book is a massive federal and state investment — “reimbursements” — to expand voluntary bus programs like METCO. Another model is voluntary two-way busing, which uses theme-based magnet schools to attract middle-class students to poorer neighborhoods, opening up middle-class school seats for low-income children.
Although Mr. Kozol’s writing is anything but dry, his understanding of educational research has always been careful and rigorous, said Gary Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, an institute that provides data on persistence of school segregation by race and class.
Dr. Orfield credited Mr. Kozol for not allowing himself to be distracted from the types of technocratic school reforms often favored by politicians, such as increasing high-stakes testing.
“He’s just relentless,” Dr. Orfield said. “He is angry and offended by the reality that he sees going on and on. And nobody cares.”
Mr. Kozol is far from alone in calling for the nation to refocus on school desegregation and the disparities between rich and poor neighborhoods. Several new organizations in Washington are dedicated to these issues and have attracted significant supporters.
But Mr. Kozol is frustrated that Republican Democrats rarely support big investments in desegregating schools. And he said he is not interested in other forms of school choice, such as charters or vouchers, which also help low-income students escape low-performing schools. Like many traditional liberals, he sees these options as financial leeches on the public school system and is skeptical of Republican and conservative support for them.
He began writing Ending Inequality before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the book barely mentions how the crisis upended education policy, as schools in the country’s most liberal cities were closed for longer, with people of color low-income students to fall even further behind.
Nor does it address the fact that after the pandemic, parents — including some of those he cares most about — became more likely to support school choice.
That omission bothers some education activists, even those who admire Mr. Kozol.
“You can’t give reparations to the system that hurt people,” said Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, a group that supports the expansion of charter schools and vouchers. “You have to give it to the people who damaged the system.”
But Mr Kozol sticks to the traditional concept of public education – one system for everyone. “A democratic nation needs to have a truly democratic, well-funded public school system,” he said.
On a table next to his armchair was a picture frame it paints, now faded, a sun peeking over the horizon. The artist, Pineapple, was a stubborn girl who appears in many of his books, chronicling the struggles of growing up in the South Bronx in the wake of the crack epidemic and AIDS.
“I asked her, ‘Is the sun rising or setting?’ Mr. Kozol recalled. “And he looked at me and said, ‘You decide.’
