Savage Inequalities

Commonweal, April 10, 1992 by Barbara Roche

In 1988, Jonathan Kozol began a two-year journey, visiting schools and talking with school children in approximately thirty neighborhoods in cities throughout the U.S. He shares his journey with us in Savage Inequalities. What he found, "a remarkable degree of racial segregation that persisted almost everywhere," startled him. That racial segregation, combined with stark economic inequity, Kozol says, creates a dual society in public education in America.

The descriptions of the neighborhoods and the schools Kozol visited are almost numbing. In East St. Louis, high schools have to be closed when sewage flows into the kitchens and the student bathrooms; in Chicago, pencils, paper, and crayons are rationed, beginning in January; in New York, four kindergartens and a sixth-grade class of Spanish-speaking children are packed into a single, windowless room; in Camden, New Jersey, teachers do not have books for half the children in their classes. "Looking around some of these inner-city schools, where filth and disrepair were worse than anything I'd seen in 1964, I often wondered why we would agree to let our children go to school in places where no politician, school board president, or business CEO would dream of working," says Kozol.

Kozol shows us again and again how these conditions affect the children. "Most adolescents in the poorest neighborhoods learn very soon that they are getting less than children in the wealthier school districts." He writes, "about injustice most poor children in America cannot be fooled." Dr. Lillian Parks, the superintendent of the East St. Louis schools, observes, "Gifted children are everywhere in East St. Louis, but their gifts are lost to poverty and turmoil and the damage done by knowing they are written off by their society. They have no feeling of belonging to America." Echoing those thoughts are the East St. Louis student who asks, "Are we citizens of East St. Louis or America?" and the Washington, D.C., student who says, "By doing this [they] teach you how much you are hated."

In the urban schools Kozol visited, 95 to 99 percent of the students were non-white. "The fact of ghetto education as a permanent American reality appeared to be accepted." The nation, he contends, has turned its back, morally if not yet legally, on Brown v. Board of Education. In fact, the battles now being fought are to stop what the late Supreme Court Justice William Douglas termed "a dramatic retreat from Plessy v. Ferguson." The principal of an elementary school in New York, when asked if race is the decisive factor in the poor condition of his school, states baldly, "This would not happen to white children." And a student in Camden declares, "So long as there are no white children in our school, we're going to be cheated. That's America. That's how it is."

Economic inequity, which goes hand in hand with racial segregation, is the second major cause of the dual school system. This inequity has its roots in what Kozol calls "the arcane machinery by which we finance public education," the property tax. Very poor communities do place a high priority on education and, in fact, often tax themselves at higher rates than do their affluent neighbors. However, because their tax base is so much poorer, they are likely to end up with far less money for each child in school. For example, the entire property wealth of Camden--$250 million--is less than the value of just one casino in Atlantic City.

In response to the increasing popularity of the argument that, as the Wall Street Journal says, "money doesn't buy better education ... cash alone can't do the trick," Kozol points out that no one is exhorting the wealthy districts to cut back on their investments in education. A high school principal in Camden says, "If you don't believe that money makes a difference, let your children go to school in Camden. Trade with our children." An urban planner in Washington, D.C., challenges, "If anybody thinks that money's not an issue, let the people in Montgomery County put their children in the D.C. schools. Parents in Montgomery would riot."

"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," writes Kozol. "Unlike a tainted sports event, however, a childhood cannot be played again."

Jonathan Kozol challenges us to work for a more expansive view of what is possible in American education. "There is plenty of space. No child needs to use a closet for a classroom. There is enough money. No one needs to ration crayons, books, or toilet paper .... All our children ought to be allowed a stake in the enormous richness of America."