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.
Also, here is what happened when over 150 volunteers expressed interest in helping area schools with reading tutoring.
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
Grab the Lapels 
Great review! And what an insightful book…. and it does jar our belief system, like liberals also not willing to always support level up education system. This seems to be the story not just in US though, breaking the cycle when others hold power is difficult. Woohoo on the volunteering though!
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Thank you, and welcome to my blog. It is really depressing about liberals voting against what they proclaim to believe. It really reminds me of this excellent novel called Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle. Some reviewers on Goodreads claimed that it was racist because he’s a white male, and the book is about Mexican immigrants. However, I would argue that the book is less about those immigrants and more about the main character and his wife, both white liberals who are in a good economic place, who proclaimed to want more immigrants to come into the US, peace and love, that sort of thing. Yet, when two immigrants are camping out in the liberals’ backyard, he loses his shit. It really shows what a hypocrite he is when a problem affects him directly.
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Oh dear, I must have read this on my phone in the car, because I thought I’d commented on this already but I see I haven’t.
Anyhow, yes, that’s exactly what I thought the main point of The tortilla curtain was – that is to make us white liberals think about our actions versus our beliefs.
I feel very strongly about this education issue. In Australia, the private versus public (government) school debate is huge. I insisted our kids go to the government school because I couldn’t stand the elitism of the private school system. My kids primary (elementary) school was one of the lowest socioeconomic schools in our city. This doesn’t mean it was in some dangerous, shabby area, or that the classrooms were falling apart with broken desks, or whatever. It means that our suburb happened to have a large percentage of lower income people, because funding here across government schools is reasonably equitable. We had a great principal and great teachers, and I was very happy with the education our kids got. They also went to the government high school where most – though not all – of my friends’ kids went. There were times when I worried that I was putting my ideology ahead of their futures but I just had to stick with what I believe, which is that equality of education is worth arguing for and if I’m going to argue for it, I’m not going to send my kids to a school that is inequitable (that has its own pool, its own dedicated drama theatre, its own multiple sports grounds, its specialist teachers). Who knows who or what they’d be now if we’d made different choices, but I love the sort of human beings they are, and I think they agree with the choices we made. (Of course they were indoctrinated by me so that’s not surprising!)
Well-off people refusing the equitable sharing of taxes really makes me MAD. I’m not as socialist as Bill, but I do believe that we all have a responsibility to ensure equal access to education and health, not to mention housing and food. These should be givens. It is surely obvious that well educated and healthy people cost society less in the long term – IF we MUST look at it from an economic not humanitarian point of view.
Oh, and I always volunteered – as I did when my kids went to school in the USA too. I love that you have applied to volunteer. I hope you hear back.
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I love that you’re passionate about public education like I am. I don’t often meet other people who get quite so fired up about it. I think that your kids turned out just fine, and I also think it’s wild that we have this idea that our kids need to be the tip top best of everything. When I was teaching at Notre Dame, it was wild how everyone in the room was the top person from their own school, and then at the University they were also trying to be the top there. A whole lot of nervous people running around. There used to be a private Facebook page on which people could anonymously submit issues that they had with the university, and many of them discuss things like taking a water bottle full of vodka to class to self-soothe because they were so overwhelmed. I want everyone to do their best, but I think that we need to acknowledge that some of us are going to be mediocre in places. I mean, I graduated college with a C and algebra, and that was with studying and a tutor. That was the best it was going to get! I also failed a music class. I would tell my own students these things on the first day of class, because they all expected to get straight A’s, and that’s just not reasonable.
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Oh good for you Melanie for telling those students that, for backing up with your own experience. That is about the most powerful thing students can experience – living proof of ways of being and of ways of thinking about what success is.
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I always volunteered in the public schools when my kids went there, but it got more and more difficult, especially at the high school, because of all the security the schools kept adding. By the time my youngest graduated from high school we thought it was like a prison. Ostensibly it’s to keep bad people out, but one result is to make it harder for volunteers.
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Depending on how old your kids are now, they probably grew up in the rise of bomb threats or the advent of school shootings, so I understand it.
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I hope you enjoy the volunteering – stuff like that really does make a difference to overstretched public services! I don’t know how I would volunteer at my local school all the time I am working a 9-5 job, but I would love to do so. Most of our local schools have adults from the community who go in to listen to young children read – I did this as part of my work experience when I was in secondary school and really enjoyed it. It’s not quite the same thing, but I helped with kids’ work at church for over a decade despite not having children and I really loved it.
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Honestly, Lou, I think helping kids is helping kids, whether you do it in church or at school. Bravo to you! I’m very proud that my friends care about stuff like this, too. I know that I’m lucky in that I’m a freelance interpreter, meaning I set my own schedule. Not everyone can do stuff like this. I was even wondering if Nick might be able to do something like have lunch with a child one day per week. He’s pretty shy, though. We’ll see. With all the craziness happening in the US right now, it feels good to double down and turn into my community and try to make it better there. I can’t change what’s happening in Washington DC, obviously.
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This sounds so interesting! I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about public school. In many ways it can be the great equalizer – Peter and I are very middle class but our kids go to school with the children of millionaires and with kids whose families live well below the poverty line. They all get the same education (though obviously they are not necessarily all having the same experience). But in some ways that’s a perk of a small town where there aren’t many other choices outside the local public school. I definitely remember seeing more of this kind of divide growing up in Vancouver. The public schools I went to weren’t this bad but I grew up on the east side which was typically a poorer, immigrant neighbourhood. I remember the first time I saw the standardized test results for all the city’s schools and how clear it was that the “better” schools were in wealthier areas. And for many years we had a premier (kind of like governor of the province) who sent her son to private school and had no personal experience of public schools.
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Thanks for the Canadian perspective; I really appreciate hearing about what it’s like over there. I do think it’s a tendency for a lot of us liberals in the US to just assume everything in Canada is better all the time. Maybe this sounds silly, but I’m proud to know that Peter is a public school teacher, and that your children go to public schools. I feel like at some point in time you were talking about potentially sending them to a private school, but that’s been many years ago. Was that you? Maybe it was Anne? I’m not sure. I’m glad to hear that your children are also in classes that have a diversity of students, even if it is only financial (you didn’t mention if there was racial diversity). It sounds like my nieces and nephew are getting the same experience. And I absolutely have to imagine that you have volunteered at the school before. You’re such a do-gooder and the best way, and I’m proud to know you. 🙂
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That may have been Anne as we don’t really have private school options in our area. Pearl started kindergarten in September 2020 though and I did briefly have some thoughts about keeping her home longer because of concerns around COVID. (In the end, we sent her and it was the right choice.) There are certainly issues with the public school system and I know my family approaches it with a lot of built in privilege but I’m also such a believer in its importance. Very, very few of my Christian friends send their kids to public school; most of them home school and I sometimes feel frustrated seeing these caring, thoughtful families opt out of the system instead of trying to better it. I believe it’s really important for my kids to experience the fact that not every family looks or acts or believes like ours does. Part of their education is learning how to deal with a wide variety of people. We don’t have a lot of racial diversity in the school or even in our community at large but that is something that’s steadily improving as the population demographic changes. I do try to volunteer at the school, though it’s been less in the past year as I’ve been working more. It’s such a good way to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on there, as a parent. I would 100% recommend calling your local school and seeing how you might volunteer. I know non-parents who have gone in and read to classes. In our district you just need to have a criminal record check done. Schools always need more help!
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I think it’s knowing you have privilege that puts you in a good position to do some good. I wouldn’t expect someone who is extremely disadvantaged to also donate their time, though statistically, in the US, it’s poor people and disadvantaged people who do more volunteering and donating. In my experience at the private Christian college, I found that most of them were homeschooled, and all that did was keep them from having empathy for other human beings.
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I see a lot of different styles and attitudes of homeschooling and some I understand as a choice that is best for that family or that child. It’s when people homeschool because of some idea of fear around public schools, that’s what frustrates me. Maybe you’re right, it is a lack of empathy. It makes it very easy to stay in a bubble.
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There are SO many kids who would thrive in a homeschool environment, and the two I’ve seen that I find convincing are kids who are just way more academically successful than what they would get at school. These are the kids who are “too much” for a curriculum, almost, because they’re so incredibly intelligent, and kids with certain kids of disabilities. I think you’re right on about the fear component, and I had not thought of it that way.
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I always try and acknowledge that I have kids who do really well in a public school setting and that isn’t the case for every kid. I know families who have chosen the homeschool route because their child needs more attention/focus/stimulation/whatever than they can receive in a classroom of 20+ students. I don’t fault that at all. At the same time, I’ve also seen families who homeschooled kids who really could have benefitted from the resources of the public system. Most of the Christian families I know have chosen to homeschool because they are at least partially afraid of the “worldly” influence on their families. But unless you expect your child to attend a religious university and only ever have a job within the Christian sphere, I feel like parents need to equip their kids to live within the world as it actually is. Peter will say that the best thing you learn in public school is how to deal with all kinds of people.
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Holy crap, Karissa, you know what’s bizarre? So many of my classmates at the religious college were homeschooled because of religious reasons, then they went to this religious college where we had to sign a contract agreeing to never swear, fornicate, etc, and then quite a number of these people, after they graduate, go on to either work at that same University or set up a business right near it and patronize the students. It’s such a little self-serving bit of weirdness! They really truly do not mingle out there with us heathens.
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I know a lot of Christians who are self-employed and I think it stems from a similar thing. It’s very weird to me as a Christian because Jesus himself was very much out there, mingling with all kinds of people.
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If this were the ’90s, we would say Jesus was rollin’ with the homies.
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Haha, definitely!
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This sounds like a fascinating book, and not surprising to read about the inequality of schools in poorer areas vs wealthier areas. Also, there’s this stat going around that prisons look at the literacy rates of kids in grade 3 to determine how many prison cells they will need to build when those kids are adults, as there is a direct correlation between kids literacy rates and their ‘success’ in adult life i.e. holding down a steady job, staying out of crime, etc.
Anyway, I’ll fully admit I’m part of the problem, I send my kids to private school because it offers more childcare options – it was the only place I could find in my area with full time preschool and kindergarten. And it’s a preschool to grade 12 school, so if my kids like it there, we will keep them there as long as possible. As a working mom, I didn’t have the option of sending my kid to a public school when they were younger because the childcare didn’t exist. Now that they are older, I don’t want to take them out of a school that they have friends in, and that they like. Plus, it’s a French school, it’s a Lycee, so it’s quite diverse. I’m like the parents in this book in many ways – I don’t want to send my kids to a public school just to say I am, if this school is a better fit for our family. If that makes sense?
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I think the childcare part is a big deal here, as you only have so many options. Plus, disrupting your kids’ friendships isn’t helpful to them. I suppose if you have time, you can volunteer at your public school. Or, if your province votes on school funding, vote to support public schools. I didn’t think private schools are inherently bad, but in the US, many states feel that if you send your kids to private school or home school then, you should get your tax money back. Right now in Michigan there is a bill to give anyone without kids their tax money back. I’ve never had a fire, but I still support the firefighters. It’s about community. In the end, I feel as long as you aren’t a road block, you’re a good egg.
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Totally. I’m still a supporter of public education, and this is how I vote in our elections, although it somehow never seems to be enough…it’s definitely tricky
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Sue might say I’m more socialist than she is, though perhaps I’m just louder. So let’s be up front: 1. My father was in charge of Primary (k-6) education in the state of Victoria during the 1980s; and 2. My youngest daughter went to private school for years 7-12. (I tried to avoid the local high school – in a perfectly ordinary middle class suburb – for the other two, but they insisted on going there). Why? Because the private school had the resources to make sure my daughter got the best possible results.
I resented that my father sent me to a country high school with very middle of the road teachers, and I didn’t want that for my own kids. As it happens, all three of them dropped out at some stage only to return and become high achievers under their own steam.
We in Australia are now in the situation where the federal government is giving private schools much, much more money (per student) than it is providing to government schools.
Your report of the situation in the US is dismaying, because whatever we think about ourselves as a caring society, Australia follows every stupid American trend in hospitals, medicine, universities, schooling, and the general privatisation of government services. We’re just a few years behind you. And from what my son, who teaches in low income schools, says, there is already a big gap here between lower class and middle class schools.
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I would love to hear more about your son’s opinion, but I feel like that’s a lot to ask. I do understand that people may choose a private school, and while I’m very vocal about it and wouldn’t do something like that myself, I do remember that what I’m saying is hypothetical because I don’t have children. Children. What I do know is that in my state, if you homeschool your children or send them to a private school, the state gives you back the taxes that you paid to support public schools. To homeschool someone or send them to a private school costs a good deal and requires sacrifice that most families in a low-income situation cannot do. That’s my beef. I don’t think it’s fair to advantage some children, particularly our own, to even further hinder and road block other children who have zero choices. For instance, another commenter said that she sends her children to private school because they had a built-in daycare that she needed to support her family. I understand that. Again, my concern is that when we decide to stop funding public schools and leave a whole lot of poor kids in the dust. As I mentioned in someone else’s comment, in the state of Michigan, there’s a politician right now who is trying to pay back taxes to people in the state who don’t have kids. Basically, any money that you would pay in taxes that go to the local public school you would get back. Do we not believe in children? Do we not believe in democracy? Education is the foundation of democracy. And if people don’t have a heart for that, the sheer numbers show that if we are shittily educating our kids, they wind up in prison and it costs us about seven times as much.
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Melanie, I agree with you totally. The whole jailing poor/brown people thing, which costs a fortune, instead of providing decent educations and usable social services, is economically as well as morally ridiculous.
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