Separate and Unequal : SAVAGE INEQUALITIES; Children in America’s Schools, <i> By Jonathan Kozol (Crown: $20; 262 pp.) </i>
In the republic of pluck and elbow grease, the mythic America that exerts such influence on the actual one, the playing field is invariably level. Class and race matter not. They exist, of course, but only as incidental traits, spices for the melting pot. We want to see our nation as one of those populist bomber crews from a war movie, superficially diverse but ultimately equal.
This ideal, however, harbors a dark side. For if every American is born into comparable opportunity, then no American fails for any reason except sloth, deceit or some other personal defect. The last 11 years have seen the celebration of individualism raised to the level of public policy, and rarely with more disastrous results than in the field of education, where the chasms between rich and poor, white and black, suburban and urban have grown to an unbridgeable width.
The entire idea of public schools, we often forget, is a relatively new one in the United States. Several decades into this century, high schools were expected to serve only a tiny elite bound for college. In New York City in the 1910s, for instance, well above three-quarters of students from immigrant stock failed to graduate. At least a kind of raw, brutal truth admitted that the poor and foreign-born were not supposed to succeed, except in the factory.
Conditions as scandalous as any Jacob Riis chronicled now typify public schools in hundreds of cities. But rather than confess to the social engineering that has created at least three separate and unequal systems--one for suburban children, one for gifted city kids in “magnet” programs, and one for the remaining unfortunates--the prevailing political wisdom holds that a lack of discipline or basic skills or standardized tests is at fault. Raise the common-sense issues of class size or teacher salaries or instructional equipment and one will be told, “Money doesn’t make a difference.”
Jonathan Kozol does more than attack such bromides in “Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools.” He demolishes them with the relentless moral fervor of an Old Testament prophet. In this compact and detailed jeremiad, the author of “Death at an Early Age” travels from the South Bronx to San Antonio to Chicago, harvesting example after rending example of schools without books, without windows, without athletic uniforms, without adequate libraries, without working laboratories. After each revelation, he cuts in cinematic fashion to an affluent district just across a river or over a hill or beyond the city limits, where courses in Latin and Russian and admissions to Ivy League colleges are routine. And, finally, Kozol answers the question these comparisons beg:
“If the New York City schools were funded, for example, at the level of the highest spending suburbs of Long Island, a fourth-grade class of 36 children such as those I visited in District 10 would have had $200,000 more invested in their education during 1987. Although a portion of this extra money would have gone into administrative costs, the remainder would have been enough to hire two extraordinary teachers at enticing salaries of $50,000 each, divide the class into two classes of some 18 children each, provide them with computers, carpets, air conditioning, new texts and reference books and learning games--indeed with everything available today in the most affluent school districts--and also pay the costs of extra counseling to help those children cope with the dilemmas that they face at home. Even the most skeptical detractor of ‘the worth of spending further money in the public schools’ would hesitate, I think, to face a grade-school principal in the South Bronx and try to tell her that this ‘wouldn’t make much difference.’ ”
Kozol aspires to almost literally nauseate a reader, to create a level of discomfort that forces the passive conscience into action. Confronted with the high school in East St. Louis, Ill., that is periodically flooded with raw sewage, or the New York class that meets in a former coal bin, I could not help but remember the words of Rian Malan, as he plumbed South Africa’s racial tragedy through murder after murder in “My Traitor’s Heart”: “Are you sick and confused, my friend? I’ll make you sick yet. I’ll hold you down and pound these images into your brain, like Simon pounded white skulls with his hammer, and I’ll keep on pounding until they poison you the way they poisoned me.”
What lifted Malan’s book to greatness, however, is precisely the quality Kozol’s lacks. In South Africa’s racial murders, Malan found unanticipated layers of complexity and nuance. But Kozol, as he runs geographical variations on his theme, rarely penetrates to a deeper level of analysis. His horror stories, as a result, take on a dulling sameness, even to a reader like myself who shares and applauds his sense of indignation.
Kozol waits, for instance, until the last chapter of the book to explicate the system of municipal property taxes that, as he correctly argues, has created the pattern of “savage inequalities.” The decline of industry and the flight of the middle class have left large cities in a double bind: They must tax property at a higher rate than suburban communities do, because that property tends to be less valuable, and even so they cannot raise a similar amount of money per pupil.
State aid does not compensate for the difference, because it simply gives more funding to every district. And the few efforts, such as Gov. James Florio’s in New Jersey, to actually bring equity to school aid have provoked tax revolts and virtual class war. A student from the affluent suburb of Rye, N.Y., tells Kozol, “Taxing the rich to help the poor--we’d be getting nothing out of it. I don’t understand how it would make a better educational experience for me.”
Such words inspire outrage, especially coming from one so young and so entitled, but what is Kozol’s answer to the question of how to fairly endow city schools without taking money away from the suburbs? He never really offers one. It is too pat for Kozol to cite the most fabulously wealthy suburban high schools, like those in Beverly Hills and in the New Trier district on Chicago’s North Shore, as if these represent the norm outside the slums. During my years of reporting about education in the suburbs of Chicago and New York, I saw dozens of school districts forced to close buildings, lay off teachers and endure strikes because citizens voted down any tax increase.
Are such schools, then, villains because their woes are not the worst? In Kozol’s selective vision, apparently so. He is justifiably unsparing of the legislators, lawyers, educators and politicians who starve urban schools and then blame them for being skinny. Yet he asks virtually nothing from the children, parents and school leaders in poor neighborhoods except that they elicit our sympathy.
As Alex Kotlowitz showed in his admirable book about a Chicago housing project, “There Are No Children Here,” one need not blame the victim or dodge the determinism of race and class to invest anyone, including a victim, with some measure of autonomy over his life.
