E-mail a friendJonathan Kozol
airdate October 7, 2005
The Chicago Sun-Times has called Jonathan Kozol 'today's most eloquent spokesman for America's disenfranchised.' In his work, Kozol explores race, poverty and education. A Harvard grad, he moved to Boston's Roxbury neighborhood and became a public school teacher. After being fired for reading a Langston Hughes poem to his students, he wrote Death at an Early Age, which put urban schools on America's political agenda. His new book is The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.
Jonathan Kozol
Tavis: Jonathan Kozol is an award-winning author who's devoted much of his life and career to issues of education and social justice. His latest book is a blunt assessment of public education in America at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The book is called "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America". Jonathan, nice to have you on the program.
Jonathan Kozol: A pleasure, a pleasure.
Tavis: First of all, congratulations on your New York Times piece. I saw the last Sunday's edition, Number 12.
Kozol: On the best seller list.
Tavis: Yeah. I was surprised, too, to see that people -- well, pleasantly surprised.
Kozol: Well, I think there are a lot of decent people in the United States who are still willing to look with an open mind or who will share my outrage that this nation has reverted to a degree of segregation that we have not seen since the death of Dr. King. It's just amazing. I think there are a lot of people of all races who are not just shocked by this, but are heartsick that all the work that a generation of unselfish civil rights workers devoted, the stuff of which Dr. King gave his life is now being ripped apart in city after city across this nation.
Tavis: But, Jonathan, that is a strong and sweeping indictment --
Kozol: -- It sure is.
Tavis: To say that what we are witnessing is the restoration of apartheid in schools in America. You did that deliberately, I take it.
Kozol: I did it deliberately for the following reason. Look, across the nation, the schools I visited -- I visited sixty schools to do this book -- I simply never see any white children. It's not just these schools that kind of segregated. These schools are completely segregated. Maybe out of four thousand kids in a big city high school in Los Angeles, there will be eight white students. That's it. You know, this is a segregation rate of like 99.9 percent. So at most, if you want to be charitable, you could one-tenth of one percentage point marks the difference between legalized apartheid in the south of fifty years ago and socially and economically enforced apartheid in almost all our major cities now.
I go into these schools, Tavis, and I've been doing this for years. You know, I don't write books from think tank data. I trudge the corridors, I sit in the little kindergarten chairs, squeeze my bottom into those chairs. I watch what's going on and listen to the kids. I look into the faces of the kids and, if I have the nerve, I look right in their eyes and I usually see them looking in my eyes too because now little kids search grown-ups all the time. They want to know what we're thinking.
I try to tell myself that this post-modern millennial apartheid is what Thurgood Marshall and Dr. King died for. It doesn't matter to these kids whether this is legally enforced or whether it's enforced by poverty and social factors and residential red-lining. It doesn't really matter to them why. The fact is, these kids know they're growing up sequestered, cordoned off from the white society, they don't know any white children --
Tavis: -- Your argument in the book is, speaking of the kids, that, to the point you're making now, that the kids are fundamentally aware of this.
Kozol: Absolutely.
Tavis: What's your sense of what they feel about what they're being subjected to, the kids themselves?
Kozol: A classic example is a black student, a bright young woman in Harlem in New York who said to me, "It's like if you had something you wanted to throw away, but didn't know where to put it, you'd put it out in the garage." I said, "That's how you feel?" and she said, "Yeah, I feel we've been put out in the garage." A little girl, a fifth grader in the South Bronx named Pineapple, who's this delightful little girl who kind of takes over the book, a bossy little girl. She's a wonderful, smart, bossy child. She's been telling me what to do for fifteen years. She reminds me of Oprah a little bit because she's so smart and assertive.
Pineapple once said to me, "Jonathan, what's it like over there?" and I said, "What do you mean, over there?" I was upset, so I tried to blur it and I said, "Do you mean where I live in Massachusetts?" and she said, "No, I mean over there where people like you can live." Sure, these kids, they understand perfectly well. They have been cordoned off from the mainstream of society because this society, no matter what the rhetoric of our president or other politicians, considers these kids a threat to the privileged education of affluent people and, no matter how many times the president and other people say that, you know, oh, these children can learn to their potential, the fact is, they don't believe it. If they did believe it, they would let them go to the same good schools that their children attend.
Tavis: All right. So to that point, to that point, what, then, since you've indicted the president here -- Bush, in this particular instance -- what does this president, what does his administration, not get about the intersection of race and class with our educational system? What do they not get?
Kozol: Well, first of all, what they don't get is that the mere fact of isolating kids damages the white society every bit as much as it damages these black and Latino kids because it denies all our children the opportunity to grow up knowing the country that they really live in. The president has not spoken a word, hasn't lifted a little finger, to address this sweeping resurgence of segregation during his time in office.
Second, the president is under some sort of delusion that, if we simply test these kids to death starting now in many schools -- they're starting high-stakes tests in kindergarten, little tiny babies -- if we simply test these kids nonstop into oblivion and that will somehow miraculously give them wonderful schools even though they be separate and unequal. The president doesn't seem to have read any history or he probably hasn't been in any schools for a long, long time except for photo opportunities and you don't learn anything that way. The fact of the matter is that these profoundly segregated schools that I visit are not just bastions of contemporary apartheid. They are also brutally unequal.
Little kids I write about in the Bronx, to take an easy example in New York, they're all black and Latino kids. I asked one teacher in the neighborhood, "How many white kids have you taught over the years?" She thought for a long while and she said, "Jonathan, I've been teaching here for eighteen years and I've had one white student." You know, these schools also receive far less money than is given to children of people of my privileged class.
A simple example, little Pineapple whom I described before. She was getting $11,000 a year put into her public schooling every year. You lift up Pineapple in your grown-up arms and you plunk her down in beautiful white Manhasset, which is a typical lovely suburb of New York -- a lot of my Harvard classmates live out there -- she'd be getting $22,000 a year put into her public education.
Tavis: And yet you know there are people watching right now who are saying, though, that, Jonathan, you don't solve the problems of education simply by throwing money at the problems. How many times you heard that?
Kozol: Oh, my God, I've heard that forever. Look, the way they usually say it to me is, "Can you really solve this problem by throwing money at it?" And who asks me that question? It's always the people whose kids who go to the $22,000 school system. Frequently in New York and Boston where I live, these folks don't simply send their kids to the spectacular public high school in their wealthy suburb when they're teenagers. They send them off to these wonderful New England prep schools. I live a few miles from Andover and Exeter and Groton. These are privileged schools where presidents go and children of presidents who become presidents.
Andover right now costs, with all expenses, it probably costs about $40,000 a year for your kid to go there. I have white friends who have two kids there at once, so they're spending $80,000 a year to guarantee their children the royal road to Harvard or Princeton and then they have the nerve to look me in the eyes and they say, "Can you really buy your way to better education?" I'm very blunt with them when they say that to me. They're spending $80,000 a year and they begrudge Pineapple getting a trifle more than a pittance? They say, "Can you really buy your way to better education?" I say, "I don't know. It seems to do the trick for your kids, doesn't it?"
Tavis: I pulled out my little handy blue card here because I want to make sure I got this quote correct. In the New York Times earlier this summer, you wrote of No Child Left Behind -- No Child Left Behind, of course, is President Bush's answer to what you are talking about with regard to the education crisis -- you wrote of No Child Left Behind and I quote, "Its driving motive is to highlight failure in inner city schools as dramatically as possible in order to create a groundswell for support for private vouchers or other privatizing schemes."
Kozol: Yes.
Tavis: I take it you believe that since you wrote it.
Kozol: Well, I do believe that, but I think that's not the most serious problem with it. The problem with No Child Left Behind is that it has introduced not simply intelligent use of testing to find out how kids are doing which I approve of fully, it's introduced testing at a sociopathic level, obsessive and repetitive, so that in the poorest schools in the country where the kids are most likely not to do well on the tests, the principals of these schools live in a state of terror --
Tavis: -- I hate to cut you off, but I'm out of time here. Let me ask you in thirty seconds right quick why these four states are the most segregated states where education is concerned: California, New York, Illinois, Michigan. Why are those states so much worse off than other states where segregation is concerned in the classroom?
Kozol: Well, one of the main reasons is that, in all these states, there has been not only the traditional white flight that we see elsewhere in the nation, but in all these states, white folks who do remain within the cities are setting up these little boutique schools, charter schools, which sound like something innovative, but in fact are targeted at a very narrow sector of the population.
In California, they're setting up all these lovely sort of I call them wheat germ academies where the counter-cultural semi-liberals can have their children educated separately from black children. Even within our segregated systems, we have a new layer of segregation. I'm telling you, Tavis, as unfashionable as it might be and I know I'm not saying anything that's popular right now in the United States, but I'm too old to bite my tongue and I'm going to keep on fighting on this issue until my dying day.
Tavis: The book is "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America" written by the all too shy Jonathan Kozol. We got to get him to come out of his shell the next time he comes on. I appreciate your passion. Glad to have you on.
Kozol: Thanks for having me.
Tavis: Glad to have you here. Any time. Up next on this program, speaking of passion, a great actor, Elijah Wood, joins us. Stay with us.
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