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Equity after Katrina
VUE Number 10, Winter 2006
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Segregation and Its Calamitous Effects: America's "Apartheid" Schools
By Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozol is a nonfiction writer, educator, and activist, best known for his award-winning books on the plight of disadvantaged children in the United States.
> Author's Biography
Schools are now as segregated as they were when Martin Luther King Jr. died, with corrosive effects for children in racially isolated schools. And school reformers have played a role in resegregating schools.
For nearly forty years, Jonathan Kozol has been chronicling the dispiriting conditions of children in urban public schools. His first book, Death at an Early Age, described his experiences as a fourth-grade teacher in Boston in the 1960s. Savage Inequalities decried the wide gaps in resources available to inner-city and suburban schools.
Kozol's most recent book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, argues passionately that urban schools have become segregated and thus are inherently unequal to those in more affluent areas. He describes the lack of educational opportunities available to children in urban schools and the stultifying curriculum they often receive.
Kozol spoke with Voices in Urban Education editor Robert Rothman about the conditions of children in urban schools and the role of education reformers in perpetuating inequalities.
Transcript of Interview
Q: Your book came out about the same time as Hurricane Katrina. Both revealed, for many people, what had been hidden from much of the public's view: the vast inequities in American society and the conditions under which many African Americans live. Why do you think these gaps have been hidden for so long, and why did it take such dramatic events to expose them?
The most stunning lesson from Katrina was not so much the inequalities as the literal physical segregation of African American people. It's remarkable. Those who visited the shelters that were created in Houston and elsewhere tell me they walked into huge rooms in which there were no White people. In other words, the shelters were colonies of segregation because the neighborhoods that were least served were also so profoundly segregated. I think racial separation, as much as inequality, is what stunned the nation.
However, the question you asked
is, Why has this not been noted before?
I think the media in general — the
mainstream media — have been embarrassed
to confront directly the degree
to which their own cities and school
systems have become so profoundly
segregated. The major newspapers in
the nation tend to favor integration as
a national ideal, but in their own front
yards — their own communities — they
tend to support neighborhood schools,
charter schools, niche academies, and
what I call "boutique" public schools
that have a powerful segregative effect.
Most newspapers refuse to use the
adjective segregated in a narrative
description of a segregated school;
instead, they use euphemisms such
as a school with a diverse population.
The word diverse has come to mean
the opposite of diverse. It usually means
a school that is totally Black and
Hispanic, with a handful of, perhaps,
Pakistani immigrants or Southeast
Asians. So that's one reason: the
shameful silence of the press.
The second reason is that many of those in the school-reform movement, including some of my closest friends and colleagues, have virtually shut their eyes to this issue for the past decade. They tend to speak of ways to run more innovative segregated and unequal schools, or smaller and more intimate segregated and unequal schools, or, in the case of those who are more politically or pedagogically conservative, segregated and unequal schools with Black kids wearing uniforms and chanting self-help slogans. Or segregated and unequal schools with private and corporate partners. But, by a convenient defect of vision, they have refused to name the moral travesty at the center of the issue: the fact that these, basically, are apartheid institutions.
It is remarkable that I had to write this book in order to compel educators to address this fact, because one doesn't really need statistics, one only needs to have visited inner-city schools throughout the past five years to see what's taking place. In the inner-city schools I visited, it's not simply that I don't see many White children — I never see any White children. If you took a photograph of a typical classroom I visited, it would be indistinguishable from a photograph of a school in Mississippi in 1935 or 1940. Segregation has returned to public education with a vengeance. The percentage of Black kids who now go to integrated schools has dropped to its lowest level since the death of Dr. King in 1968.
Backlash against the Success of School Integration
As a sort of footnote to that point, the press tends recklessly to tell the public that integration was a failure. In fact, this is a gross distortion of history. Integration, during the period of its enforcement, roughly from 1965 to 1990 — because it took about a decade before Brown was seriously enforced — was a spectacular success. Tens of thousands of schools all over the country integrated with remarkably healthy and optimistic results. During that period, the so-called achievement gap between Black and Brown children, on the one hand, and White children, on the other, narrowed dramatically. Black children, in particular, made greater gains in achievement during that period than in an entire century.
Since the early 1990s, the Rehnquist Court has progressively ripped apart the enforcement mechanisms of Brown and even came to the point recently, in St. Louis, of denying school systems funding for voluntary integration. During this period, schools have been dramatically resegregated and the achievement gap between Black and Brown kids and White kids has widened progressively, or else remained flat. Even in these most recent years, as Mr. Bush has enforced his obsessive testing and accountability regime in public schools, there have been absolutely no sustained gains for minority children.
We're also speaking of the absolutely predictable results of segregation, which is unequal schooling with calamitous results for those we cordon off in schools our own children — white children — don't attend.
Even when there is a slight uptick in [test] scores, these are testing gains; these are not learning gains. These are a direct result of obsessive teaching to the test. The reason I know this is the following: I follow all these kids — I follow hundreds of kids that I've known in several cities, especially in the Bronx in New York — and the same fourthgraders who allegedly have suddenly made a 5-percent gain in their reading scores don't retain these skills. I meet the same kids four years later, when they are in eighth grade, and they can't write a cogent sentence or read a textbook that's basically written at the fourth-grade level. In fact, by the time minority kids are in twelfth grade, the average Black or Latino twelfth-grader in America now reads and computes at approximately the same level as White seventh-graders.
So we're not simply dealing with segregation having returned with a vengeance. We're also speaking of the absolutely predictable results of segregation, which is unequal schooling with calamitous results for those we cordon off in schools our own children — White children — don't attend.
Rigid, Deadening Pedagogy
Q: In your book you describe an intellectually deadening atmosphere.
Yes — the curriculum that's been introduced as a consequence of the testing pressures.
Q: But the schools you've been writing about for forty years are intellectually arid places. I thought that's why you wrote your first book. Are things worse now?
They're far worse. First of all, the segregated school in which I taught fourth grade in Boston was, in pedagogic terms, almost libertarian compared to what I'm seeing now in these anxietyloaded, test-driven inner-city schools. Yes, we were stuck with the old Dick and Jane readers. But there was sufficient flexibility so that lots of teachers could do interesting things and you weren't monitored every minute of the day to make sure you were "on task." (I hate that term, so I always use it in quotes.)
Q: You couldn't do that today?
Not in the schools I'm talking about, no. Since around 1995, as states began to enforce these very rigid lists of state standards, associated directly with highstakes examinations, and then began penalizing or humiliating school principals who couldn't deliver magical gains in a matter of two years, a state of siege has taken over in hundreds of these schools, or probably thousands, not just the ones I've visited or where I know teachers.
There hasn't been anything like this in American education since the early part of the century, when Elwood Cubberley and Edward Thorndike and their colleagues were in their prime, when they were enforcing the efficiency agenda modeled on business practices. It's that agenda that has been re-created in the past ten years. Although all the entrepreneurial and technocratic school reform experts claim that they're doing something new and radical, in fact, this is simply a tiresome reconstruction of the same agenda that was put in place during the 1920s.
The Wrong Way to Address the Achievement Gap
Q:One thing that seems new now is that, rhetorically at least, there is some attention to the achievement gap, and it's now national policy to close the gap. Isn't that some sign of progress?
No. Because I think it's insincere. I think, certainly at the federal level, at the level of the Bush administration, it's either insincere or it's being pursued in a way that's so destructive and counterproductive that it represents the worst kind of sincerity — what Erik Erikson called "destructive conscientiousness."
Look, if you want to address the
achievement gap, you do it in the ways
that worked in the past.We didn't
need all of these incredibly repetitive,
arid, and jargon-loaded national conversations
and symposiums and conferences
on "ways to turn it all around,"
without speaking of separate and
unequal schooling.We simply didn't
need that.We would look at the numbers.
Even to this day, the most dramatic
success rates for minority kids are in
integrated public schools that they
attend either under some of the few
remaining court orders or in voluntary
programs, such as the interdistrict program
that surrounds Boston, a similar
program that surrounds Milwaukee,
a similar program that surrounds
St. Louis — although that one is now
under attack by the government — and
in the ultimate interdistrict program,
which takes place in the Louisville area,
where it's no longer necessary to cross
district borders, since Jefferson County
has become one large multiracial district.
I have these statistics in my book,
but you don't really need statistics if
you spend any time in these schools.
I'm an eyewitness to what happened to Black children who were being bludgeoned by the mediocre education in their segregated schools in Boston and [saw] what happened to them when they came into a beautifully funded school with enormously supportive school principals who had been given a great deal of preparation in order to receive these kids with sensitivity and wisdom. And I'm telling you that virtually every kid I know who went into that program — and I've known hundreds since — went on to higher education. I'd say at least 95 percent went on to higher education, most to very good four-year colleges, like Brown, and Amherst, and Spelman, and Yale, and Harvard.
The fact that school reformers will not look at this reality is a gifted evasion of the central point. The central point is that the Warren Court was right: separate schools (I'm paraphrasing the decision), even when physical and other measurable factors may appear to be equal, are inherently unequal. With the exception of a handful of boutique schools, segregated schooling has never been equal to the schooling that's given to the mainstream of this nation, and it's sheer folly to pretend that they will suddenly become equal in the century ahead. It ain't gonna happen.
The Difficulty of Acting on Basic Human Decency
Q:Do you think that part of the problem is that people really don't want equality, and that they're more concerned with their own kids? If their own kids are doing well, why care about somebody else's kids?
No! I talk with an enormous mainstream of people in the United States, and I find that the overwhelming majority — White Americans, I mean — do not wish ill to poor children of color, do not act upon racist beliefs, and, frankly, tell me again and again they wish there were a way to give the same good things they are giving to their own kids to all the children in the same metropolitan community.
I write at length about a little girl named Pineapple, who's become a favorite in my life. If any White people that I meet almost anywhere in America, with the exception of a small core of really hardened souls, ever got to know Pineapple, they'd want to do anything in the world they could do for her. But very few of these decent White people will ever meet Pineapple, will ever know of her existence. Oh, they'll read about her in academic studies, but they'll never know she's real.
Polls taken all over the country indicate the vast majority of White Americans — White parents — still believe their children will receive a better education in an integrated school. And, needless to say, an even larger proportion of Black people continue to believe that adamantly, despite the handful of bombastic separatists who are typically quoted in conservative White media. The suburban integration program surrounding Boston, for example, has 3,300 kids in it. But, at any given time, there's a waiting list of 16,000. That represents a third of all the Black and Latino kids in the Boston public schools. And we see those waiting lists everywhere.
Segregated schooling has never been equal to the schooling that's given to the mainstream of this nation, and it's sheer folly to pretend that they will suddenly become equal in the century ahead. It ain't gonna happen.
to believe that adamantly, despite the handful of bombastic separatists who are typically quoted in conservative White media. The suburban integration program surrounding Boston, for example, has 3,300 kids in it. But, at any given time, there's a waiting list of 16,000. That represents a third of all the Black and Latino kids in the Boston public schools. And we see those waiting lists everywhere.
You asked about White people. I don't think we live in a hateful nation of people who want to give the best only to their child and who are somehow able emotionally to write off everybody else. But I think the structures we have created have made it very difficult for ordinary American people to act on their own essential decency. And I think many of us in the school-reform field have unwittingly and innocently colluded in the creation of some of those divisive structures. To give a simple example: the newest trend of the day is small and intimate urban schools. That's this year's panacea. And, by the way, in its origins, it's a beautiful idea, and individuals like Debbie Meier have carried it out with great success. But what has happened is, a gentle and pedagogically progressive notion has now been adopted, essentially, as a systematic way of doing an end run around the central obstacle to healthy and equal education for poor children. School systems now are stamping out (by "stamp out" I don't mean eradicate, but stamp them out like from a cookie cutter) small academies, recklessly, usually giving them thematic identifications that have very little connection with what is actually happening at the school. And they're usually bad schools. Their success rate is terrible, with a few exceptions.
The Gates Foundation has given its imprimatur to this movement and is helping school systems to stamp out small schools — and, in this process, has done an enormous amount of damage in many school districts by failing to make even the slightest nod toward making sure that these schools would have multiracial populations.With their resources, with the immense funds available to the Gates Foundation, they could very easily have created tremendous fiscal incentives for school systems or communities to create marvelous small schools that cut across all lines of race and class. And they simply failed to do so.
Integration, the First Step toward a Solution
Q:If you were invited to a national commission on education, what would you say? What would it take to create an equitable system?
Number one, until our residential patterns are no longer so profoundly segregated in this nation, we need to break down district barriers between school districts in order to create the Jefferson County model, or as close to it as we can come, in every metropolitan area of the nation. As [Gary] Orfield notes in my book, it's hard to imagine this in New York City. He urged me, if I want to be optimistic, not to look at New York.
Q: Hard cases make bad law.
Yeah, and he's right. I wouldn't start with Chicago or New York or Los Angeles, but in dozens and dozens of fairly large cities and, more to the point, in middlesized and smaller cities, we should create not only a strong ethical pressure upon those in the suburbs who really do profess good will and, I think, are serious in their intent on this issue, but we should also put billions of dollars in federal money into providing irresistible incentives to these districts to make it possible for all the children in these metropolitan areas to sit together at that famous table of brotherhood of which Dr. King spoke.
We have to organize a very strong
public political campaign in order to
destigmatize the idea of students taking
transportation to go to a good school.
I once asked Alice Washington, who's
the mother of the central figure in my
book Amazing Grace, "What would you
do if your son could escape his neighborhood
high school in the Bronx, and
you could give him a fifteen-minute
bus ride (which is all it would have been)
to Bronxville, which is the first White
and wealthy suburb to the north of
New York (where, by the way, $19,000
per pupil is spent every year, and where
everyone graduates)?" And she looked
at me and said, "Are you kidding?
What mother who loves her child
wouldn't jump at that opportunity?"
And I said, "And you wouldn't worry
that he might lose some of his African
American identity?" Now, she was a
strong Afrocentric person herself. She
put me on to a lot of the best Black literature
that I've read. And she looked
at me and said, "I'll take care of his
Black identity. You make sure that he
can get into the same kind of good
school that got you into Harvard."
So, if I were secretary of education — which is not going to happen, but if I were — I wouldn't simply toy with No Child Left Behind and try to make it a little more child-friendly or teacherfriendly or open it up a bit so it would be more respectful of good assessment practices like portfolios, which of course I used to do and which I support. I wouldn't fiddle around with those small, incremental changes. I would abolish No Child Left Behind when it is time for it to be reauthorized in 2007. I would get rid of it completely, and I would take all that money that's now going into high-stakes testing and the more important expense, which is the cost of teacher time diverted from teaching to testing and to preparation for tests, and add all that money that's now going to companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review if schools fail to make their AYP within two years.
I'd take all that money, then I'd triple it, and I'd put all of it into giving massive financial incentives to every metropolitan community in America where it is at all feasible to break down district barriers and create wonderful, very expensive, and, as I predict, inevitably very successful schools — ideally, small ones; I favor them — schools in both the cities and the suburbs to which children of all races would be more than willing to take a comfortable ride every day. In most cities this could be done with a thirty-minute ride, at most, leaving out the three or four big cities I mentioned.
The Need to Bury "Separate but Equal" Once and for All
In other words, to me the best school reform would be to turn our backs on Plessy v. Ferguson, which never worked, which was the most deceptive promise Americans were ever given; to stop repeating that promise, which is what most urban school reformers are doing right now, saying we can have separate but equal schools with innovative methods to make the school day more creative, to have more critical thinking, and so forth. I'd go right in on that and say, no, that isn't what Brown was about. That isn't what Thurgood Marshall lived for.
That's what I would do. Meantime, I would fight for three parallel goals. I would immediately create universal, full-day, richly developmental preschool, starting at the age of two and a half, for every low-income kid in America. This nation can easily afford to do that. You could probably do that with the money spent in a few months of the Iraqi war.
To me the best school reform would be to turn our backs on Plessy v. Ferguson, which never worked, which was the most deceptive promise Americans were ever given.
Another practice I would support would be to abolish virtually all highstakes testing. I would revise the whole testing apparatus to do only diagnostic testing. And when children are demonstrably in bad trouble, I would never institute Skinnerian approaches like Success for All. I would spend a lot of money to use remarkably successful and highly enlightened programs like Reading Recovery. It's very expensive, but it's the best way.
I'm talking about sparing no funds. I would argue strongly to the public that we are not a Third World nation, and we don't have to choose between giving kids small class size in tenth grade or giving them pre-K when they're two years old. I'm saying we're rich enough to do both.
And finally, if I were education secretary, I would advocate for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would scrap the present system of school finance entirely. It would guarantee an equally high level of public education to every child in America, so the education of our children will no longer be dependent either on local property wealth or on these so-called equalization formulas in the sundry states, which never equalize, or do so only temporarily until the legislature has a change of mood.
It's inherently irrational to have our children educated, as we say they are being educated, to be Americans; educated, as we say they are being educated, to have a wise role in the American electoral processes, in the jury system, in the economy, and, if need be, in the military; but then to finance their education on the basis of the wealth or poverty of the district or state in which they live.
So, those are a few modest proposals I would make if I were education secretary. But I don't think I'm headed for that destiny. I haven't made friends with enough corporate leaders and foundation heads.
Some people say to me, you're sixty-nine years old, why don't you make the rest of your life easy and create an inoffensive institute to establish a network of slightly more innovative schools with more critical thinking, incorporating the views of my own mentors and teachers, such as Paulo Freire and Fred Rogers, whom I miss so much, and Howard Gardner, and so forth. But I don't want to go to my grave helping to polish the apple of apartheid. I want to stir teachers and educators and decent academics to be more than technicians of innovative proficiencies — I want to stir them to be warriors of justice.
REFERENCES
Kozol, J. 1967. Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Kozol, J. 1991. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. New York: Crown.
Kozol, J. 1995. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. New York: Crown.
Kozol, J. 2005. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York: Crown.
Archives
Equity after Katrina
VUE Number 10, Winter 2006
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
Segregation and Its Calamitous Effects: America's "Apartheid" Schools
By Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozol is a nonfiction writer, educator, and activist, best known for his award-winning books on the plight of disadvantaged children in the United States.
> Author's Biography
Schools are now as segregated as they were when Martin Luther King Jr. died, with corrosive effects for children in racially isolated schools. And school reformers have played a role in resegregating schools.
For nearly forty years, Jonathan Kozol has been chronicling the dispiriting conditions of children in urban public schools. His first book, Death at an Early Age, described his experiences as a fourth-grade teacher in Boston in the 1960s. Savage Inequalities decried the wide gaps in resources available to inner-city and suburban schools.
Kozol's most recent book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, argues passionately that urban schools have become segregated and thus are inherently unequal to those in more affluent areas. He describes the lack of educational opportunities available to children in urban schools and the stultifying curriculum they often receive.
Kozol spoke with Voices in Urban Education editor Robert Rothman about the conditions of children in urban schools and the role of education reformers in perpetuating inequalities.
Transcript of Interview
Q: Your book came out about the same time as Hurricane Katrina. Both revealed, for many people, what had been hidden from much of the public's view: the vast inequities in American society and the conditions under which many African Americans live. Why do you think these gaps have been hidden for so long, and why did it take such dramatic events to expose them?
The most stunning lesson from Katrina was not so much the inequalities as the literal physical segregation of African American people. It's remarkable. Those who visited the shelters that were created in Houston and elsewhere tell me they walked into huge rooms in which there were no White people. In other words, the shelters were colonies of segregation because the neighborhoods that were least served were also so profoundly segregated. I think racial separation, as much as inequality, is what stunned the nation.
However, the question you asked
is, Why has this not been noted before?
I think the media in general — the
mainstream media — have been embarrassed
to confront directly the degree
to which their own cities and school
systems have become so profoundly
segregated. The major newspapers in
the nation tend to favor integration as
a national ideal, but in their own front
yards — their own communities — they
tend to support neighborhood schools,
charter schools, niche academies, and
what I call "boutique" public schools
that have a powerful segregative effect.
Most newspapers refuse to use the
adjective segregated in a narrative
description of a segregated school;
instead, they use euphemisms such
as a school with a diverse population.
The word diverse has come to mean
the opposite of diverse. It usually means
a school that is totally Black and
Hispanic, with a handful of, perhaps,
Pakistani immigrants or Southeast
Asians. So that's one reason: the
shameful silence of the press.
The second reason is that many of those in the school-reform movement, including some of my closest friends and colleagues, have virtually shut their eyes to this issue for the past decade. They tend to speak of ways to run more innovative segregated and unequal schools, or smaller and more intimate segregated and unequal schools, or, in the case of those who are more politically or pedagogically conservative, segregated and unequal schools with Black kids wearing uniforms and chanting self-help slogans. Or segregated and unequal schools with private and corporate partners. But, by a convenient defect of vision, they have refused to name the moral travesty at the center of the issue: the fact that these, basically, are apartheid institutions.
It is remarkable that I had to write this book in order to compel educators to address this fact, because one doesn't really need statistics, one only needs to have visited inner-city schools throughout the past five years to see what's taking place. In the inner-city schools I visited, it's not simply that I don't see many White children — I never see any White children. If you took a photograph of a typical classroom I visited, it would be indistinguishable from a photograph of a school in Mississippi in 1935 or 1940. Segregation has returned to public education with a vengeance. The percentage of Black kids who now go to integrated schools has dropped to its lowest level since the death of Dr. King in 1968.
Backlash against the Success of School Integration
As a sort of footnote to that point, the press tends recklessly to tell the public that integration was a failure. In fact, this is a gross distortion of history. Integration, during the period of its enforcement, roughly from 1965 to 1990 — because it took about a decade before Brown was seriously enforced — was a spectacular success. Tens of thousands of schools all over the country integrated with remarkably healthy and optimistic results. During that period, the so-called achievement gap between Black and Brown children, on the one hand, and White children, on the other, narrowed dramatically. Black children, in particular, made greater gains in achievement during that period than in an entire century.
Since the early 1990s, the Rehnquist Court has progressively ripped apart the enforcement mechanisms of Brown and even came to the point recently, in St. Louis, of denying school systems funding for voluntary integration. During this period, schools have been dramatically resegregated and the achievement gap between Black and Brown kids and White kids has widened progressively, or else remained flat. Even in these most recent years, as Mr. Bush has enforced his obsessive testing and accountability regime in public schools, there have been absolutely no sustained gains for minority children.
We're also speaking of the absolutely predictable results of segregation, which is unequal schooling with calamitous results for those we cordon off in schools our own children — white children — don't attend.
Even when there is a slight uptick in [test] scores, these are testing gains; these are not learning gains. These are a direct result of obsessive teaching to the test. The reason I know this is the following: I follow all these kids — I follow hundreds of kids that I've known in several cities, especially in the Bronx in New York — and the same fourthgraders who allegedly have suddenly made a 5-percent gain in their reading scores don't retain these skills. I meet the same kids four years later, when they are in eighth grade, and they can't write a cogent sentence or read a textbook that's basically written at the fourth-grade level. In fact, by the time minority kids are in twelfth grade, the average Black or Latino twelfth-grader in America now reads and computes at approximately the same level as White seventh-graders.
So we're not simply dealing with segregation having returned with a vengeance. We're also speaking of the absolutely predictable results of segregation, which is unequal schooling with calamitous results for those we cordon off in schools our own children — White children — don't attend.
Rigid, Deadening Pedagogy
Q: In your book you describe an intellectually deadening atmosphere.
Yes — the curriculum that's been introduced as a consequence of the testing pressures.
Q: But the schools you've been writing about for forty years are intellectually arid places. I thought that's why you wrote your first book. Are things worse now?
They're far worse. First of all, the segregated school in which I taught fourth grade in Boston was, in pedagogic terms, almost libertarian compared to what I'm seeing now in these anxietyloaded, test-driven inner-city schools. Yes, we were stuck with the old Dick and Jane readers. But there was sufficient flexibility so that lots of teachers could do interesting things and you weren't monitored every minute of the day to make sure you were "on task." (I hate that term, so I always use it in quotes.)
Q: You couldn't do that today?
Not in the schools I'm talking about, no. Since around 1995, as states began to enforce these very rigid lists of state standards, associated directly with highstakes examinations, and then began penalizing or humiliating school principals who couldn't deliver magical gains in a matter of two years, a state of siege has taken over in hundreds of these schools, or probably thousands, not just the ones I've visited or where I know teachers.
There hasn't been anything like this in American education since the early part of the century, when Elwood Cubberley and Edward Thorndike and their colleagues were in their prime, when they were enforcing the efficiency agenda modeled on business practices. It's that agenda that has been re-created in the past ten years. Although all the entrepreneurial and technocratic school reform experts claim that they're doing something new and radical, in fact, this is simply a tiresome reconstruction of the same agenda that was put in place during the 1920s.
The Wrong Way to Address the Achievement Gap
Q:One thing that seems new now is that, rhetorically at least, there is some attention to the achievement gap, and it's now national policy to close the gap. Isn't that some sign of progress?
No. Because I think it's insincere. I think, certainly at the federal level, at the level of the Bush administration, it's either insincere or it's being pursued in a way that's so destructive and counterproductive that it represents the worst kind of sincerity — what Erik Erikson called "destructive conscientiousness."
Look, if you want to address the
achievement gap, you do it in the ways
that worked in the past.We didn't
need all of these incredibly repetitive,
arid, and jargon-loaded national conversations
and symposiums and conferences
on "ways to turn it all around,"
without speaking of separate and
unequal schooling.We simply didn't
need that.We would look at the numbers.
Even to this day, the most dramatic
success rates for minority kids are in
integrated public schools that they
attend either under some of the few
remaining court orders or in voluntary
programs, such as the interdistrict program
that surrounds Boston, a similar
program that surrounds Milwaukee,
a similar program that surrounds
St. Louis — although that one is now
under attack by the government — and
in the ultimate interdistrict program,
which takes place in the Louisville area,
where it's no longer necessary to cross
district borders, since Jefferson County
has become one large multiracial district.
I have these statistics in my book,
but you don't really need statistics if
you spend any time in these schools.
I'm an eyewitness to what happened to Black children who were being bludgeoned by the mediocre education in their segregated schools in Boston and [saw] what happened to them when they came into a beautifully funded school with enormously supportive school principals who had been given a great deal of preparation in order to receive these kids with sensitivity and wisdom. And I'm telling you that virtually every kid I know who went into that program — and I've known hundreds since — went on to higher education. I'd say at least 95 percent went on to higher education, most to very good four-year colleges, like Brown, and Amherst, and Spelman, and Yale, and Harvard.
The fact that school reformers will not look at this reality is a gifted evasion of the central point. The central point is that the Warren Court was right: separate schools (I'm paraphrasing the decision), even when physical and other measurable factors may appear to be equal, are inherently unequal. With the exception of a handful of boutique schools, segregated schooling has never been equal to the schooling that's given to the mainstream of this nation, and it's sheer folly to pretend that they will suddenly become equal in the century ahead. It ain't gonna happen.
The Difficulty of Acting on Basic Human Decency
Q:Do you think that part of the problem is that people really don't want equality, and that they're more concerned with their own kids? If their own kids are doing well, why care about somebody else's kids?
No! I talk with an enormous mainstream of people in the United States, and I find that the overwhelming majority — White Americans, I mean — do not wish ill to poor children of color, do not act upon racist beliefs, and, frankly, tell me again and again they wish there were a way to give the same good things they are giving to their own kids to all the children in the same metropolitan community.
I write at length about a little girl named Pineapple, who's become a favorite in my life. If any White people that I meet almost anywhere in America, with the exception of a small core of really hardened souls, ever got to know Pineapple, they'd want to do anything in the world they could do for her. But very few of these decent White people will ever meet Pineapple, will ever know of her existence. Oh, they'll read about her in academic studies, but they'll never know she's real.
Polls taken all over the country indicate the vast majority of White Americans — White parents — still believe their children will receive a better education in an integrated school. And, needless to say, an even larger proportion of Black people continue to believe that adamantly, despite the handful of bombastic separatists who are typically quoted in conservative White media. The suburban integration program surrounding Boston, for example, has 3,300 kids in it. But, at any given time, there's a waiting list of 16,000. That represents a third of all the Black and Latino kids in the Boston public schools. And we see those waiting lists everywhere.
Segregated schooling has never been equal to the schooling that's given to the mainstream of this nation, and it's sheer folly to pretend that they will suddenly become equal in the century ahead. It ain't gonna happen.
to believe that adamantly, despite the handful of bombastic separatists who are typically quoted in conservative White media. The suburban integration program surrounding Boston, for example, has 3,300 kids in it. But, at any given time, there's a waiting list of 16,000. That represents a third of all the Black and Latino kids in the Boston public schools. And we see those waiting lists everywhere.
You asked about White people. I don't think we live in a hateful nation of people who want to give the best only to their child and who are somehow able emotionally to write off everybody else. But I think the structures we have created have made it very difficult for ordinary American people to act on their own essential decency. And I think many of us in the school-reform field have unwittingly and innocently colluded in the creation of some of those divisive structures. To give a simple example: the newest trend of the day is small and intimate urban schools. That's this year's panacea. And, by the way, in its origins, it's a beautiful idea, and individuals like Debbie Meier have carried it out with great success. But what has happened is, a gentle and pedagogically progressive notion has now been adopted, essentially, as a systematic way of doing an end run around the central obstacle to healthy and equal education for poor children. School systems now are stamping out (by "stamp out" I don't mean eradicate, but stamp them out like from a cookie cutter) small academies, recklessly, usually giving them thematic identifications that have very little connection with what is actually happening at the school. And they're usually bad schools. Their success rate is terrible, with a few exceptions.
The Gates Foundation has given its imprimatur to this movement and is helping school systems to stamp out small schools — and, in this process, has done an enormous amount of damage in many school districts by failing to make even the slightest nod toward making sure that these schools would have multiracial populations.With their resources, with the immense funds available to the Gates Foundation, they could very easily have created tremendous fiscal incentives for school systems or communities to create marvelous small schools that cut across all lines of race and class. And they simply failed to do so.
Integration, the First Step toward a Solution
Q:If you were invited to a national commission on education, what would you say? What would it take to create an equitable system?
Number one, until our residential patterns are no longer so profoundly segregated in this nation, we need to break down district barriers between school districts in order to create the Jefferson County model, or as close to it as we can come, in every metropolitan area of the nation. As [Gary] Orfield notes in my book, it's hard to imagine this in New York City. He urged me, if I want to be optimistic, not to look at New York.
Q: Hard cases make bad law.
Yeah, and he's right. I wouldn't start with Chicago or New York or Los Angeles, but in dozens and dozens of fairly large cities and, more to the point, in middlesized and smaller cities, we should create not only a strong ethical pressure upon those in the suburbs who really do profess good will and, I think, are serious in their intent on this issue, but we should also put billions of dollars in federal money into providing irresistible incentives to these districts to make it possible for all the children in these metropolitan areas to sit together at that famous table of brotherhood of which Dr. King spoke.
We have to organize a very strong
public political campaign in order to
destigmatize the idea of students taking
transportation to go to a good school.
I once asked Alice Washington, who's
the mother of the central figure in my
book Amazing Grace, "What would you
do if your son could escape his neighborhood
high school in the Bronx, and
you could give him a fifteen-minute
bus ride (which is all it would have been)
to Bronxville, which is the first White
and wealthy suburb to the north of
New York (where, by the way, $19,000
per pupil is spent every year, and where
everyone graduates)?" And she looked
at me and said, "Are you kidding?
What mother who loves her child
wouldn't jump at that opportunity?"
And I said, "And you wouldn't worry
that he might lose some of his African
American identity?" Now, she was a
strong Afrocentric person herself. She
put me on to a lot of the best Black literature
that I've read. And she looked
at me and said, "I'll take care of his
Black identity. You make sure that he
can get into the same kind of good
school that got you into Harvard."
So, if I were secretary of education — which is not going to happen, but if I were — I wouldn't simply toy with No Child Left Behind and try to make it a little more child-friendly or teacherfriendly or open it up a bit so it would be more respectful of good assessment practices like portfolios, which of course I used to do and which I support. I wouldn't fiddle around with those small, incremental changes. I would abolish No Child Left Behind when it is time for it to be reauthorized in 2007. I would get rid of it completely, and I would take all that money that's now going into high-stakes testing and the more important expense, which is the cost of teacher time diverted from teaching to testing and to preparation for tests, and add all that money that's now going to companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review if schools fail to make their AYP within two years.
I'd take all that money, then I'd triple it, and I'd put all of it into giving massive financial incentives to every metropolitan community in America where it is at all feasible to break down district barriers and create wonderful, very expensive, and, as I predict, inevitably very successful schools — ideally, small ones; I favor them — schools in both the cities and the suburbs to which children of all races would be more than willing to take a comfortable ride every day. In most cities this could be done with a thirty-minute ride, at most, leaving out the three or four big cities I mentioned.
The Need to Bury "Separate but Equal" Once and for All
In other words, to me the best school reform would be to turn our backs on Plessy v. Ferguson, which never worked, which was the most deceptive promise Americans were ever given; to stop repeating that promise, which is what most urban school reformers are doing right now, saying we can have separate but equal schools with innovative methods to make the school day more creative, to have more critical thinking, and so forth. I'd go right in on that and say, no, that isn't what Brown was about. That isn't what Thurgood Marshall lived for.
That's what I would do. Meantime, I would fight for three parallel goals. I would immediately create universal, full-day, richly developmental preschool, starting at the age of two and a half, for every low-income kid in America. This nation can easily afford to do that. You could probably do that with the money spent in a few months of the Iraqi war.
To me the best school reform would be to turn our backs on Plessy v. Ferguson, which never worked, which was the most deceptive promise Americans were ever given.
Another practice I would support would be to abolish virtually all highstakes testing. I would revise the whole testing apparatus to do only diagnostic testing. And when children are demonstrably in bad trouble, I would never institute Skinnerian approaches like Success for All. I would spend a lot of money to use remarkably successful and highly enlightened programs like Reading Recovery. It's very expensive, but it's the best way.
I'm talking about sparing no funds. I would argue strongly to the public that we are not a Third World nation, and we don't have to choose between giving kids small class size in tenth grade or giving them pre-K when they're two years old. I'm saying we're rich enough to do both.
And finally, if I were education secretary, I would advocate for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would scrap the present system of school finance entirely. It would guarantee an equally high level of public education to every child in America, so the education of our children will no longer be dependent either on local property wealth or on these so-called equalization formulas in the sundry states, which never equalize, or do so only temporarily until the legislature has a change of mood.
It's inherently irrational to have our children educated, as we say they are being educated, to be Americans; educated, as we say they are being educated, to have a wise role in the American electoral processes, in the jury system, in the economy, and, if need be, in the military; but then to finance their education on the basis of the wealth or poverty of the district or state in which they live.
So, those are a few modest proposals I would make if I were education secretary. But I don't think I'm headed for that destiny. I haven't made friends with enough corporate leaders and foundation heads.
Some people say to me, you're sixty-nine years old, why don't you make the rest of your life easy and create an inoffensive institute to establish a network of slightly more innovative schools with more critical thinking, incorporating the views of my own mentors and teachers, such as Paulo Freire and Fred Rogers, whom I miss so much, and Howard Gardner, and so forth. But I don't want to go to my grave helping to polish the apple of apartheid. I want to stir teachers and educators and decent academics to be more than technicians of innovative proficiencies — I want to stir them to be warriors of justice.
REFERENCES
Kozol, J. 1967. Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Kozol, J. 1991. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. New York: Crown.
Kozol, J. 1995. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. New York: Crown.
Kozol, J. 2005. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York: Crown.
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