Rebuilding the schoolhouse: author Jonathan Kozol talks about education reform, choice and Chelsea's school - Interview - Cover Story

Author Jonathan Kozol talks about education reform, choice and Chelsea's school.

When Bill and Hillary Clinton announced in early January that their daughter, Chelsea, would be attending an exclusive private school in the nation's capital, they ignited a firestorm of criticism - and rekindled the debate over public vs. private schools and school "choice." There is in Washington a public school good enough for the nation's First Child, many argued.

But such reasoning begs an important question: Even if the Clintons had chosen to send their daughter to one of the District's top-notch public schools, what about all the not-so-good public schools in Washington, and the 80,000 children who have no choice but to attend them - given that the best schools can accept only so many pupils?

It is that question author Jonathan Kozol wants Bill Clinton the president to address, even as Bill Clinton the parent makes other choices for his own child. A former teacher, Kozol is angered and saddened by the increasingly separate and unequal schooling in America, and he calls for a new back-to-basics education movement: public school systems that provide all their students with comfortable classrooms, textbooks, libraries, teachers and - most important - an equal opportunity to learn and succeed.

Kozol's most recent book, Savage Inequalities, is a profoundly disturbing look at conditions in the nation's schools, as well as the personal attitudes and political policies that have created them. Kozol spent two years visiting public and private schools in Chicago, New York, East St. Louis, San Antonio, Washington and Camden, N.J. He saw school buildings that had been flooded with sewage, closets serving as classrooms, classes with no teachers and buildings where even the toilets didn't work. He learned of state school-financing formulas that fund affluent districts at a rate 14 times greater than neighboring, low-income districts. He talked with fourth-graders studying logic and high school students who could barely read. He was struck by "the remarkable degree of racial segregation that persisted almost everywhere."

Advocate as well as author, the 56-year-old Kozol insists he will "not accept a rationing of excellence" for the nation's schoolchildren. He encourages elected officials, educators and parents to "stop making new lists [of education goals] and immediately get to work on essentials" such as the expansion of Head Start and reforms in state school-financing systems. He spoke from his home in Massachusetts.

COMMON CAUSE: What kind of impact does the Clintons' sending Chelsea to private school have on the education reform debate?

KOZOL: I don't condemn President Clinton for that decision. The daughter of a president is likely to be overwhelmed with press scrutiny, and anything that can afford her some privacy makes sense to me. That's a truly unique situation.

If you're going to condemn President Clinton for that decision, then you'd have to condemn the entire U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, as well as virtually the entire press corps in New York and Washington. Because very few of the journalists I know, certainly very few of the editors and publishers, send their kids to public schools.

I do feel heartsick at the growing inclination of not only the very wealthy but also the upper-middle class to flee. A friend of mine in New York, a woman in one of the publishing houses, when she read the first draft of Savage Inequalities, looked at me in tears. She said, "I feel awful. I'm sending my child to a private school. ... Would it do any good if I were to sacrifice her to public school? What difference would that make?"

The answer I gave is "no." If one person makes that decision, it doesn't really change anything. But if all the editors and publishers of the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, CBS, and NBC, and Random House, and Simon and Schuster, if all of them put their kids in the New York City public schools, those schools would change overnight. Because they would not allow their children to be destroyed, and therefore they would work like hell to guarantee that the public schools of New York City were the equal of any top suburban district in the country.

What I'm really getting at here is the increasing tendency of the privileged to secede not simply from public schools, but increasingly from almost all the areas of shared experience in our society. The United States is already a highly stratified society. But at least until recently, there were many areas of what I call "shared democracy," where we met on some kind of common ground and had to negotiate our differences with one another in specific situations.

Nowadays, we see the affluent increasingly refusing to pay the taxes it would take to maintain the public parks, and instead, spending their money to join private health clubs where they get their exercise in company with one another. They're reluctant to pay the money that it takes to provide police protection for the entire city, but increasingly spending a vast amount for private security to guarantee that their condominiums, their office buildings, their apartment houses are well protected.

In the same sense, they're saying that they cannot afford to tax themselves to provide first-rate schools for the children of New York, and then spending 10-, $15-, or $20,000 to send their children to private school. This, as a trend, is alarming. We have always had private schools in the United States. Some of them are wonderful schools, like Exeter. But we are now seeing something new, which is the growing tendency of much larger numbers of people to flee not only to elite schools, but to virtually any school they can get into that will spare their children the obligation, I call it the opportunity, to learn about democracy firsthand, by meeting children of other races and other economic levels. That saddens me very much.

We are already two nations, as far as race is concerned. I worry that we might become 10 or 20 different nations if this continues. I'm concerned about the Balkanization of our society into unique and insulated sectors that will no longer speak even a common language of democracy.

CC: President Clinton, the teachers' unions and many others oppose tuition vouchers that would allow the use of public education funds for private schooling, yet they support the concept of choice within public schools.

KOZOL: I am relieved that President Clinton has taken a strong stand against vouchers that would permit public funds to be used for private education. No matter what the advocates of vouchers say it is, and no matter how many neo-liberals climb on the bandwagon, vouchers originate in an ideology which is distinctly right-wing. Another historic origin of the voucher concept are the so-called "freedom of choice" schools started in the South by white segregationists after the Brown [v. Board of Education] decision. That element, either covert or subtle racism, is deeply rooted in the voucher concept.

The advocates for vouchers nowadays pose the issue in a clever, but I think dishonest, manner. They say something like this: "The rich have always had the opportunity to send their kids to private school. Why shouldn't we give poor people the same opportunity?" But when you ask them what kind of vouchers they have in mind, the amount of money they propose varies from about $1,000 to at most the amount that is spent in an inner-city public school, maybe $5,000. None of them are suggesting the $10- or $15,000 voucher that it would take to send these kids to the prep schools the rich children attend.

So in effect, under the pretense of compassion for the poor, they are simply proposing a privatized caste system in which the rich will continue to go to elite prep schools, and the poor, at very best, would be able to go to another category of private schools, either parochial schools or very poorly funded sort of second-rate private academies.

CC: But should there be choice within the public school system?

KOZOL: First of all, our capacity for historical amnesia sometimes dazzles me. The [desire for "choice" is] exactly what we heard from white people in Mississippi after the Brown decision in 1954. The fact is the government coerces us to do a great many things for the general good in this society. Our absolute right to the individual pursuit of our own ambitions is curtailed in many areas. And this is another one where it should be.

The myth here of course is that the choices will be equal and that everybody will be equally well-informed about the choices available. But these conditions are, in fact, never met and are virtually impossible to meet. First of all, people can choose only from things they've heard of. Many poor parents are only semi-literate. They have no opportunity to read the materials that school systems distribute, even the announcements calling them to meetings at which these matters might be explained in greater detail.

But even those who can read do not always read aggressively. The poorest people I know are inundated with written materials which they read so passively it is almost impossible for them to overcome the paralysis that overwhelms many aspects of their lives.

The typical conservative answer to this is, "Wait a minute, Mr. Kozol sounds very patronizing. He's telling us that the poor are too stupid to make good choices for their children." The best answer I can give you is that of a black woman in Boston who saw [John] Chubb [a leading proponent of choice] debating with me once on television and said, "We don't need our enemies explaining to our friends that we're not stupid." She said, "Stupidity isn't the issue, access is."

An awful lot of the sophisticated decisions that are made in school choice programs by the middle class tend to be decisions that are arrived at by word of mouth, because they hear very quickly from their brother-in-law, who is the school superintendent, or their sister, who is assistant to the mayor. They hear very quickly about the "boutique" school that's got the terrific principal and the six wonderful young teachers.

In Boston, whenever they discuss school choice - we have a so-called "controlled choice" plan in Boston - the press always points to the same school. I was curious as to why. Then I found as I talked with the few affluent white people I know who still have their kids in public school in Boston, that they all went to the same school. A black woman who lives in Roxbury calls me up every couple of weeks, and she's never heard of school choice, she's never heard of this neat little boutique school.

The reason school choice within a given school district has become so popular, especially with the press, is that it provides the opportunity for people who feel vaguely guilty about fleeing the public system to keep their kids in the public system in what are virtually de facto prep schools.

Now a pragmatic person might reply to me that if we didn't give them those boutique schools, they'd flee the system altogether. And then they wouldn't be there to support the system. But in a sense they've fled the system already, in that they are fighting now only for the school that their child attends, and not for the schools attended by all the other children in the system. They are in a position to raise extra money for that school, to form a real neat local PTA, to volunteer for the library or book fair, do all those things. They can make it into a terrific school, but they have very little incentive to fight for tax support for all the other schools in the system.

There are other problems with intradistrict choice, which has been introduced in Minnesota and in Massachusetts and is being discussed elsewhere. The most obvious one is that virtually none of these plans ever provide transportation money. And that certainly couldn't be an oversight. In general [advocates of intradistrict choice] are people who historically opposed school busing for integration. So it's logical that they would sort of leave that out at this point.

So who is able to take advantage of this plan? The first full year of school choice in Massachusetts roughly 93 percent of those who transferred were white and/or middle class. Twenty-seven percent were poor children. The people who took advantage of it were the people who had your typical two-parent suburban family, with two cars. The poorest parents aren't doing it because they don't have cars.

A classic example, and this doesn't involve race, just economics. Two adjacent towns: Gloucester, Mass., a rather poor school district, a lot of very low-income families, and Manchester-by-the-Sea, one of the wealthiest school districts in Massachusetts, which spends about $2,000 more per pupil than

Gloucester does.

What happened when the choice plan was announced? The more affluent people who lived in Gloucester shifted their kids into the Manchester district. Gloucester lost the money that went with those kids. It also lost the advocacy of their parents for the Gloucester public school system. And the kids left behind in Gloucester no longer have the stimulation of some of their most fortunate classmates.

In all respects, Gloucester is the loser. Gloucester has lost several hundred thousand dollars to Manchester. Manchester has in fact been able to hire one of the best Gloucester teachers. They cut a program in Gloucester and added it in Manchester.

I notice that even in some areas, sort of small industrial towns in Massachusetts, where there are a great man black or Hispanic families, virtually the only families that are using the choice option to go to suburban districts are the white middle-class families. It's interesting that here you have white parents, who 20 years ago opposed school busing for desegregation because, as they always told us, it wasn't fair to poor little black children to have to spend an hour on the bus every day to come out to our spectacular school. Now the same people are putting their kids on buses for two hours twice a day in order to flee from black and Hispanic children.

In Massachusetts I don't think there's one family that's transferred from a rich district to a poor district. In virtually every case they transfer from a poor district to a rich one. If you question them further, you usually find they speak of sports facilities. In Minnesota you hear that a lot, kids transferred because it's a better football field or better gym. Convenience is another - because it's easier for the parents, they can drop the kid off on the way to work. Or simply that they are choosing from classmates. That again brings us back to profoundly unsettling racial and class issues.

CC: Should we not have magnet schools?

KOZOL: Magnet schools are different for a number of reasons, the most important one being that they were conceived as levers of desegregation. And they are almost always created with very specific guidelines to guarantee that they cannot become sort of an escape valve for the upper-middle class.

CC: An undercurrent of the choice movement is the belief that many, if not most, of the public schools in our cities are bad and can't be saved.

KOZOL: That's a wild exaggeration, a very dangerous one. There are terrific schools in almost every city, and they're not just a few elite schools. Even in poor neighborhoods, you can always find some wonderful schools. And there are remarkable teachers and good administrators in virtually every city.

The fact of the matter is that if these school systems had the same kinds of resources that are available in the wealthiest suburbs, not simply equal funding, but funding that is equal to the relative needs that they face - if New York City, instead of having something like $7,500 year per pupil, had something like $18,000 per year per pupil as they have in Great Neck, N.Y., there wouldn't just be a couple of dozen terrific schools, there would be several hundred great schools in New York City. And the wealthy would have no reason to flee.

Some critics say, well it's not just money, it's also administration. Frankly, my belief is that the major reason that the inner-city public schools are facing the kind of problems I described in Savage Inequalities has very little to do with so-called bureaucratic problems. It has everything to do with inequality and with racial isolation. The fact is that once inner-city kids are racially isolated they get a message. The message is extremely clear, especially when they are in schools, as most of these inner-city schools are now, that are 90 to 99 percent black and Hispanic. The message they get is that they are scorned, they are shunned, that they are viewed as contaminated, that they are viewed as carriers of plague, almost. That's the message they get.

Some people, I believe, misread Savage Inequalities to imply I was arguing for separate but equal schools. I was not. The point I was making was that unless there are white and middle-class people in the urban school districts, influential people in the media, lawyers, doctors, all those people, the inner-city schools will never get equality. And unless the schools are equal, they won't ever attract white people.

CC: Conservatives argue that money is not the answer.

KOZOL: I've always been amused by those arguments. If money is not the issue, then the people who live in Great Neck, N.Y., must be crazy. If money is not the issue, why are they spending $18,000 a year for the kids in their schools? Obviously, money is the issue. It's bizarre that in this society, where nobody questions the significance of money in any other area of life, these people want us to believe that the laws of economics stop at the schoolhouse door.

Typically they'll say, "Well what are you going to do with more money?" Well, to start with you could cut the classes in many New York City schools from 40 kids in a class down to 19 children in a class. It's still more than they have at Exeter, where they have 13 in a class, but it would be a small blessing.

Then they say sarcastically, "Is a small class going to make a bad teacher into a good teacher?" No, of course not, but a teacher good with 40 kids is dynamite with 20, because she's got twice as much time to spend with every one of them.

CC: People fear that when you say equity, you're talking leveling, that all schools are going to become mediocre. Given that there is a limited pot of money, how, do you avoid that?

KOZOL: First of all, that argument is profoundly cynical, because the same people who make that argument are precisely the people who vote against higher taxes. Obviously I don't want to bring the best schools down. But if the people living in the wealthy districts, who also are those who have the most influence on elections and public policy, if these people refuse to contemplate a significant change in the tax structure in this country, which adds new resources, then unfortunately they are right. The only alternative is to take it from their schools.

But it seems to me that that represents a very penurious vision of our society. Listening to those people, you get the feeling that if we give the kids in Camden the beautiful schools that they deserve, the grass is going to turn black in Princeton. I think that this nation is not only wise but wealthy enough to give superb schools to all our children. I'm simply not going to accept what they're proposing, which is virtually a rationing of excellence.

Of course, there is no way to do it without new resources. The most obvious way we're going to get those resources is through more progressive income taxes, which are, for the first time, being discussed in Connecticut. And by significant transfer of federal resources from defense into domestic needs. I don't see any other way this can be done.

CC: What can and should President Clinton do to improve the nation's schools?

KOZOL: First of all, hold fast against the voucher advocates. Second, lend moral and personal support to the parents in over half the states in the United States who are now suing their states for financial equity in their public schools.

Third, I would hope he would at least contemplate the possibility of redirecting large amounts of federal money into educational equity.

He has talked about redirecting some of the military funds into areas of domestic infrastructure. I would propose, instead of bridges and highways, or in addition, that we redirect some of those funds to literally rebuilding the schoolhouses of America. I'm not speaking here of curriculum or testing. I'm speaking of bricks and mortar and technology.

An inspired proposal would be a one-time $50-billion school reconstruction act. Returning soldiers and laid-off employees of military contractors could be put to work building for peace, as it were. That would be an important symbolic victory for equality, and also put to work a lot of unemployed people, many of them the products of segregated and inferior schools 20 years ago.

CC: There are so many issues when we talk about improving our schools, everything from national education goals to school restructuring, to teacher testing. What are the greatest needs?

KOZOL: I think setting goals again, and again, and again, is coming to have a neurotic quality. I've been at this now for 30 years and it seems every five or 10 years we get a new list of goals, but never any talk about the resources it would take to realize them. I would stop making a list and just get to work on a couple of the essentials: Immediately expand Head Start to all three- and four-year olds. I'd like to see it be a full-day Head Start with an additional component for parent education, literacy, and political skills for the parents of these children. So they can be good advocates for their kids.

Number two: A federal reconstruction bill to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure of our schools.

Number three: A state-by-state drive for school equality.

Number four: I would like to see us take a new look at teacher education in this country. That's probably the one area where I agree with some of the conservatives. I think our teachers are frequently denied the kind of full liberal arts education they require, and given a far too mechanistic preparation.

To me the most important priority would be for this nation to reopen the issue of educational apartheid. For many years now I've found it almost impossible even to get people to speak of it. I would come into a school and see not a single white child all day long, and finally I'd say to the black principal, "Hey, would you call this a segregated school?" And he'd smile at me and put his hand on my shoulder, almost sympathetically, and say, "Gee, Jonathan, I haven't been asked that question for 10 years. Of course it is. This is American apartheid."

Is this to continue for another century? Are we at the very most going to try to have site-based ghetto schools? Ghetto schools with more input from ghetto parents? Or are we at last going to question the persistence of the ghetto school - this permanent disfigurement on the horizon of American democracy?

CC: What would your model school in a model school system look like?

KOZOL: A school in the middle of the South Bronx like Exeter. A school with beautiful brick buildings and handsome landscaped lawns, and 13 kids in a class; with teachers who feel so comfortable with that small class size that they don't need to lecture and can enjoy the pleasures of a seminar situation; in which the atmosphere is so comfortable physically and psychologically, for kids and adults alike, that the teachers needn't live and work in a state of psychological siege. I'd like to see the same rich curriculum. I'd like to see a day when we would never dream of asking a black teenage girl to concentrate in cosmetology or food preparation services, a time when we look at those kids from the age of four and five and say, this little girl has the same chance to go to Vassar as the great-granddaughter of John Rockefeller.

The school would have no tracking. We would give the least skilled children the opportunity to learn from the more skilled children, and we'd give the latter a chance to learn something about generosity by helping kids who need the help.

I speak about the physical look of a school a lot because I believe that physical conditions are not just facts in themselves, but they're also metaphors. They tell people how we value them.

CC: In all your discussions with children, what did you find are their greatest needs, desires, and goals for their education?

KOZOL: Well, kids generally, sooner or later, point to most of the things we've just discussed. They'd like to be in a class that's small enough so the teacher has time to give them attention and love. They'd like to be in a building which doesn't insult them by its smell and its crowded atmosphere. They'd like to know from an early age that they can be anything they want, and not have that just be rhetoric, but have that proven by the nature of the curriculum that's offered.

But most of all, the poorest kids want to feel respected. How do you tell kids that we respect them? You prove it to them by putting them in beautiful schools, you prove it to them by giving them the same things they know the richest kids in our country get, because they see it on TV all the time. Most of all, you do it by putting them in the same schools that our children attend, so they know to start with that we do not view them as contaminated human beings. That is a terrible crime that we are still committing in this country.

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