Savage Inequities: Children in America's Schools. - book reviews

On the low-income city of Irvington, New Jersey, where 94 percent of the students are nonwhite, an entire grade school doesn't have classrooms for 11 classes. A teacher at another Irvington school has been forced to set up shop in a coatroom. A guidance counselor meets with parents in a closet, and two classes are held in converted coal-storage bins. And at a school in nearby Paterson, reading classes take place in a bathroom.

Worst-case scenarios? Nigthmares? No, realities. And they're just a sampling of some of the grim, true stories to be found in Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. The book vividly documents some of the squalid conditions of this country's poor schools, populated primarily by children of color.

Kozol has established himself as a writer who has the ability to put a human face on education statistics: a child's face, often an African-American face, a visage that's hard to ignore, difficult to forget. Kozol is a former Boston grade-school teacher. His 1967 book Death at an Early Age, about Boston's impoverished public schools, was a best-seller and won a National Book Award. Savage Inequalities is making waves as well: A front-page Publisher's Weekly editorial called on President Bush to read the book. He's the Education President, remember?

To write Savage Inequalities Kozol visited schools in New York City, Chicago, East St. Louis and other areas. He interviewed administrators, teachers, students and parents. He discovered, sadly, and perhaps predictably, that the quality of education for people of color in America hasn't really changed for the better since the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which found that segregated education was unconstitutional because it was "inherently unequal." In fact, Kozol concludes that the nation's educational system has become even more separate and more unequal.

Kozol writes: "Liberal critics of the Reagan era sometimes note that social policy in the United States, to the extent that it concerns Black children and poor children, has been turned back several decades. . . . In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost 100 years." One key reason for this 100-year setback, according to Kozol, is that most public schools depend on local property taxes for funding. Rich suburbs have a larger tax base to draw upon than poor urban communities.

Kozol builds his case against the nation's educational system with startling anecdotal evidence. He takes us to the decrepit Morris High School in the South Bronx, New York, where a waterfall cascades down six flights of stairs when it rains. He tells the story of a poor Chicago school without a library, where books lie piled in the cafeteria, sprouting mold. And in a crumbling high school in East St. Louis, a student tells Kozol that Martin Luther King, Jr., "died in vain . . . go and look into a toilet here if you would like to know what life is like for students in this city." Kozol does look. The stalls have no doors, there is no toilet paper, and the toilets have no seats.

These episodes seem the stuff of Third World countries. But as Kozol shows, it's certainly not the mythic "indivisible" nation that millions of grade-school kids pledge allegiance to each morning. Kozol hammers home his point by comparing inner-city public schools with suburban white public schools. Almost invariably, the white-majority schools are better staffed, better supplied, better funded. It's apartheid, American-style.

During the 1989-90 school year, New York City spent $7,299 per pupil; during that same period the New York suburban school district of Manhasset, Long Island, spent $15,084 per pupil. In Chicago, during the 1988-89 school year, the school district spent $5,265 per pupil; in a Chicago suburb, New Trier High School spent $8,823 per pupil. The suburban schools, which are better funded than their urban counterparts, are relative paradises. At New Trier High, the school's advantageous district location provides it $340,000 worth of taxable property per child; Chicago's property provides it with one-fifth that amount. At New Trier High, facilities include a fencing room, an Olympic-size pool and a television station that broadcasts on four channels to three countries. That's certainly a step up from having a waterfall or a class held in a urinal. At New Trier High, where only 1.3 percent of the student body is Black, 93 percent of seniors go on to four-year colleges. At Chicago's Du Sable High School, where the student body is 100 percent Black, the graduation rate is just 25 percent. College, for most, is a daydream deferred.

After reading this book, one can't help but adopt a more cynical view of education. The problem isn't simply that America is underfunding urban schools, although that is certainly the case. The problem is that America is paying good money to keep a system of antieducation in place. Consider these figures: New York City spent just $7,299 per pupil in the 1989-90 school year. However, 90 percent of the male inmates of the city's prison's are public-school dropouts, and it cost $60,000 per year to incarcerate just one of them. One wonders why more money is being spent to incarcerate then to educate. One can't help but speculate what would have happened if each of those prison inmates had been given a $60,000 scholarship as a grade-schooler.

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