Jonathan Kozol, born 1936, was a well-educated, optimistic school teacher his first year on the job only to be blown back by the inequality in his Boston school. As stark examples of the lack of equity in public education between rich and poor students, and more notably between white and Black and brown students, he began writing and investigating American’s public education system. His books, written over decades starting in the 1960s up to 2024, are impressive, heartfelt, and highly readable.

Kozol’s big thesis might be that America still segregates school children by race due to forcing poor Black and brown families into unhealthy, dangerous, jobless neighborhoods and then sending their children to a school established locally. Most of the schools Kozol investigated in Savage Inequalities are almost 100% Black students, or a mix of Black and Hispanic. The book was published in 1991, and the research is from 1989 to 1991.

A few important elements stood out to me. Poverty is a cycle from which one cannot escape if a class of people in power make it impossible to do so. Kozol argues this clearly. Firstly, the schools attended by children in poverty are so underfunded that you wouldn’t agree to board your dog in the building. One school was a dilapidated former roller skating rink. Another had hundreds of children but only two working toilets and no toilet paper. Yet another had raw sewage flooding the halls. Most schools had no modern textbooks (or not enough old textbooks with inaccurate information), unqualified teachers, and buildings with barrels for leaking roofs, holes in the walls, and ceilings collapsing.

When adults attended these schools, they often left with no measurable education. Therefore, those adults cannot hold down jobs or make enough money to leave the area. Many are homeless. After they have children, those innocents are sent to the same underfunded, despicable school, leaving (most don’t graduate) with no appreciable education. On and on.

Yet, when nearby wealthy districts are asked if they would be agreeable to sharing the tax money they receive — and note that wealthy districts often receive many times over the tax funding poor schools get, despite poor neighborhoods having higher taxes — the answer is an emphatic “no.” Why give money to a kind of people who just can’t learn? When Kozol interviewed one individual on the cycle of poverty and its relationship to education, they responded, “Now the choices seem like they are left to you and, if you make the wrong choice, you are made to understand you are to blame. . . .” Wealthy white families view Black and brown children as a waste of resources because they just don’t want to learn or be respectable, and Kozol reasonably shows how the poor internalize the message.

Although policy changes around funding and sharing tax dollars more effectively makes sense, wealthy white areas vehemently defend their money. Why should they pay for someone else’s kid to go to school? Kozol interviews the wealthy school administrators. Some public school administrators don’t even send their children to public schools:

“The school board president in 1989, although a teacher and administrator in the system for three decades, did not send his children to the public schools. Nor does mayor Richard Daly, Jr., nor did any of the previous four mayors who had school-age children.”

This is an issue with saw with Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education in his first term. Betsy DeVos had not sent any of her children to, nor had she herself attended, a public school — not even in college. Her father was a billionaire. At the time, I asked how someone outside the system could say anything about it, but Kozol noted (see quote above) that even people within the system don’t “risk” their children to public schools. He argues effectively that policy is guided by elites with no stake in the situation.

Everyone I know who is a liberal voter or an educator was disgusted by Trump’s choice of DeVos; however, Kozol notes in his research that liberal voters still do not support desegregating schools divided by wealth and race. When an issue affects us directly, Kozol demonstrates clearly, we make individualistic choices and call that “reality”:

“[Riverdale] has been home for many years to some of the most progressive people in the nation. Dozens of college students from this neighborhood went South during the civil rights campaigns to fight for the desegregation of the schools and restaurants and stores. . . . Suddenly, no doubt unwittingly, they find themselves opposed to simple things they would have died for 20 years before. They do not want poor children to be harmed. They simply want the best for their own children. To the children of the South Bronx, it is all the same.”

We do have passionate people involved in public schools, though, so it’s not 100% doom. Impassioned teachers make a big difference in the spirits of their students, and, to the best of their abilities, in the education of their students. The negative is that highlighting amazing teachers in deplorable, stressful conditions is dangerous because such a notion suggests all public schools need are some folks with moxie. Kozol covers this counterargument, especially when conservative families cry out that more money will never “save” the children (sometimes called “animals” in impoverished schools:

“There are wonderful teachers such as Corla Hawkins almost everywhere in urban schools, and sometimes a number of such teachers in a single school. It is tempting to focus on these teachers and, by doing this, to paint a hopeful portrait of the good things that go on under adverse conditions. There is, indeed, a growing body of such writing; and these books are sometimes very popular, because they are consoling.”

And Kozol never lets the reader get comfy. There is no hopeful, beautiful moment at the end of his book because public school children in many districts are suffering, punished, by politics. Why should you feel better? If his pathos and the personal stories of the teachers and children don’t motivate you, consider the financial expense of not educating every American child to be prepared citizens. Not just in welfare benefits and homeless shelters, but the cost of leaving students to gradually understand the unfairness leveled against them as they age, which is about when they drop out of school:

“According to the New York City Department of Corrections, 90 percent of male inmates of the city’s prisons are the former dropouts of the city’s public schools. Incarceration of each inmate, the department notes, costs the city nearly $60,000 every year.”

So, if you are just a by-the-numbers person, Kozol will appeal to you. The cost of imprisoning one person is about the same as an excellent-paying job in 1991. In the back of Savage Inequalities, Kozol shares how much school districts spend per child per school year to compare large cities. In New York City during the 1986-1987 school year, it was $5,585. The richest school district in the area received $11,372 per student. That’s still almost $50,000 less than incarcerating one person.

Lastly, I’ll add that one solution posed in Savage Inequalities is making each school building dedicated two a couple of grades. Therefore, all students go to the same schools as they move through the years. When I was in elementary school, I stayed at the same building for seven years (K to 6th). I noticed my school had a lot of kids who came in wearing the same clothes every day, and we had a high number of Native American children (which I thought was normal back in the 90’s). My school was nothing like the depraved places Kozol researched, but I did hear later about other schools closer to town that sounded friendlier, nicer. Now, my hometown schools are broken up into about two grades per school, and everyone goes. I called my niece to ask what the other kids looked like. She said there are students of all different colors, and the children in special education have their own classroom, but are frequently integrated into their grade’s main classroom, exposing all students to each other regularly.

Now, I’ve commented so many times that I don’t argue politics because I can’t do much about a sitting president’s whims, but I am an avoid supporter of getting out to vote and participate in local government, and I am a die-hard public school supporter. One small note Kozol made was that wealthy school districts are bolstered by adults coming in to help in the classroom or library, to tutor or chaperone field trips. I’ve always wanted to volunteer in a public school, but I felt weird because I don’t have children. Once I finished Savage Inequalities, I looked up the area public school corporation, found a volunteer app, and mailed it off. Now, we wait.

books of winter ❄️⛄🎄

• Monster: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Deder (DNF)
• Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools by Jonathan Kozol
• This is Not a Book about Benedict Cumberbatch by Tabitha Carvan
• Deliverance by James Dickey
• Devil’s Call by J. Danielle Dorn
• Bottom of the Pyramid by Nia Sioux
• Jaws by Peter Benchley
• The Lost Girls by Allison Brennan (#11)
• The New York trilogy by Paul Auster
• The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead by Chanelle Benz
• All of Me by Venise Berry
• At Wit’s End by Erma Bombeck
• Minding the Store: Great Literature About Business from Tolstoy to Now edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge
• Touched by Kim Kelly
• Awakened by Laura Elliott
• The Road to Helltown by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs series #9)
• Crafting for Sinners by Jenny Kiefer
• After Life by Andrew Neiderman
• Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval
• How to Save a Misfit by Ellen Cassidy
• Suggs Black Backtracks by Martha Ann Spencer
• Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho