Rebuilding the schoolhouse: author Jonathan Kozol talks about education reform, choice and Chelsea's school - Interview - Cover Story

Common Cause Magazine, Spring, 1993 by Vicki Kemper

Author Jonathan Kozol talks about education reform, choice and Chelsea's school.

When Bill and Hillary Clinton announced in early January that their daughter, Chelsea, would be attending an exclusive private school in the nation's capital, they ignited a firestorm of criticism - and rekindled the debate over public vs. private schools and school "choice." There is in Washington a public school good enough for the nation's First Child, many argued.

But such reasoning begs an important question: Even if the Clintons had chosen to send their daughter to one of the District's top-notch public schools, what about all the not-so-good public schools in Washington, and the 80,000 children who have no choice but to attend them - given that the best schools can accept only so many pupils?

It is that question author Jonathan Kozol wants Bill Clinton the president to address, even as Bill Clinton the parent makes other choices for his own child. A former teacher, Kozol is angered and saddened by the increasingly separate and unequal schooling in America, and he calls for a new back-to-basics education movement: public school systems that provide all their students with comfortable classrooms, textbooks, libraries, teachers and - most important - an equal opportunity to learn and succeed.

Kozol's most recent book, Savage Inequalities, is a profoundly disturbing look at conditions in the nation's schools, as well as the personal attitudes and political policies that have created them. Kozol spent two years visiting public and private schools in Chicago, New York, East St. Louis, San Antonio, Washington and Camden, N.J. He saw school buildings that had been flooded with sewage, closets serving as classrooms, classes with no teachers and buildings where even the toilets didn't work. He learned of state school-financing formulas that fund affluent districts at a rate 14 times greater than neighboring, low-income districts. He talked with fourth-graders studying logic and high school students who could barely read. He was struck by "the remarkable degree of racial segregation that persisted almost everywhere."

Advocate as well as author, the 56-year-old Kozol insists he will "not accept a rationing of excellence" for the nation's schoolchildren. He encourages elected officials, educators and parents to "stop making new lists [of education goals] and immediately get to work on essentials" such as the expansion of Head Start and reforms in state school-financing systems. He spoke from his home in Massachusetts.

COMMON CAUSE: What kind of impact does the Clintons' sending Chelsea to private school have on the education reform debate?

KOZOL: I don't condemn President Clinton for that decision. The daughter of a president is likely to be overwhelmed with press scrutiny, and anything that can afford her some privacy makes sense to me. That's a truly unique situation.

If you're going to condemn President Clinton for that decision, then you'd have to condemn the entire U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, as well as virtually the entire press corps in New York and Washington. Because very few of the journalists I know, certainly very few of the editors and publishers, send their kids to public schools.

I do feel heartsick at the growing inclination of not only the very wealthy but also the upper-middle class to flee. A friend of mine in New York, a woman in one of the publishing houses, when she read the first draft of Savage Inequalities, looked at me in tears. She said, "I feel awful. I'm sending my child to a private school. ... Would it do any good if I were to sacrifice her to public school? What difference would that make?"

The answer I gave is "no." If one person makes that decision, it doesn't really change anything. But if all the editors and publishers of the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, CBS, and NBC, and Random House, and Simon and Schuster, if all of them put their kids in the New York City public schools, those schools would change overnight. Because they would not allow their children to be destroyed, and therefore they would work like hell to guarantee that the public schools of New York City were the equal of any top suburban district in the country.

What I'm really getting at here is the increasing tendency of the privileged to secede not simply from public schools, but increasingly from almost all the areas of shared experience in our society. The United States is already a highly stratified society. But at least until recently, there were many areas of what I call "shared democracy," where we met on some kind of common ground and had to negotiate our differences with one another in specific situations.

Nowadays, we see the affluent increasingly refusing to pay the taxes it would take to maintain the public parks, and instead, spending their money to join private health clubs where they get their exercise in company with one another. They're reluctant to pay the money that it takes to provide police protection for the entire city, but increasingly spending a vast amount for private security to guarantee that their condominiums, their office buildings, their apartment houses are well protected.