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Tuesday, 14 November 2006 15:09 |
| Jonathan Kozol
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By JIM GENARO
The United Statesë educational system has declined into an apartheid system in which minority students are relegated to inferior schools with limited resources while white students enjoy a significantly higher quality of education, Jonathan Kozol told an overflowing audience of several hundred people at UNC Ashevilleës Lipinsky Auditorium last Wednesday night.
To
accommodate the size of the crowd, the school set up a video projector
and public address system in the lobby of the auditorium.
Kozol
is an author and education specialist who has worked with inner-city
children for more than 40 years. His talk, which was titled "The Shame
of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America," was
sponsored by UNCAës Cultural and Special Events Office, as part of its
Distinguished Speaker Series.
The audience
included many educational professionals, which Kozol acknowledged by
asking the teachers in the auditorium to raise their hands.
"I love to be
with teachers," Kozol told them. "They bring joy and beauty, mystery
and mischief to the hearts of little pint-sized people."
Throughout his
talk, Kozol told several stories about his experiences with children in
classrooms he visited. Often, he said, the enthusiasm of these young
people and their desire to be acknowledged was moving to him.
In one case, Kozol asked a group of first-graders a question about the subject they were studying.
"Seven-year-olds, as every first-grade teacher knows, have only a theoretical connection with their chairs," he joked.
In response to
Kozolës question, the children jumped up, many of them barely hanging
onto their chairs, he said. One little girl in the front row
particularly showed excitement, raising her hand and saying, "I know, I
know the answer!"
However, when Kozol called on her, she said she didnët know the answer to the question.
"She didnët have
a single thing to say," Kozol told the audience. "She just wanted me to
recognize that she was there. I think thatës humbling."
Many of the
inner-city children he has worked with are starved for attention, he
said. They are crowded into classrooms that often include as many as 40
children for each teacher and are greatly underfunded, Kozol noted.
"I sometimes
think that every so-called expert from the Ivy League towers up in
Washington and every politician who speaks condescendingly about
teachers ... ought to be obliged to come to a classroom once a year and
teach a class ÇƒÓ not only to read a story for 20 minutes while the TV
cameras are on," he told the audience.
The current
state of education in the U.S. is at one of its worst points in
history, he said, particularly for blacks. "Segregation has returned
with a vengeance since the (William) Rehnquist court began to dismantle
Brown vs. the Board of Education."
His reference
was to a 1954 landmark Supreme Court case that mandated desegregation
by ruling that racially "separate educational facilities are inherently
unequal."
Fifty years
later, segregation "is at its highest level since the death of Martin
Luther King (Jr.) in 1968," Kozol said. However, unlike the Southern
segregation of Jim Crow, the current state of racial separation is
worst in the North, he said ÇƒÓ particularly in New York City and other
large urban centers.
Kozol, who noted
that he had been active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, said
that now, when he visits schools where nearly every student is black,
he realizes that "this post-millennial political apartheid is what
Martin Luther King and all our leaders lived and died" fighting.
However, when
talking to his upper-class, liberal, white friends, his protestations
on the subject often fall on deaf ears, he lamented.
"They feel
personally offended if I say, ǃÚYouëre living in the bastion of American
apartheid,ë" Kozol said of his friends. "They get nervous because they
secretly think I want to redistribute their wealth ÇƒÓ which I do."
During his
conversations with these friends, they often cite their credentials as
former participants in the civil rights marches in the 1960s, he said.
Today, however, "not one will send their children to predominantly black and Latino schools," he added.
Kozol also had
harsh words for conservative pundits ÇƒÓ many of whom he has debated with
on Fox News programs and other television shows.
Calling them
"cold-blooded, neo-fascist intellectuals," Kozol said, "They use words
like sharpened knives that cut to the bone."
He is often
attacked personally in such debates, he said, and while the barbs hurt
him, he added that "no matter whom I anger with my words, I intend to
keep on speaking on this issue to my dying day."
To put a human
face on the plight of poor children, he told the story of Pineapple, a
young girl living in the South Bronx neighborhood of New York City.
Her
neighborhood, he noted, is the poorest congressional district in the
country, "right next to one of the richest neighborhoods in the world,
the Lower East Side."
Pineapple "just
loved life," he said. "She refused to lie down in the darkness that New
York had granted her and grovel in despair."
Though she lived
in squalor, the fifth-grader loved colorful clothes and once chided
Kozol for always wearing the same black suit. "Go to a nice store and
buy yourself a new suit," she told him.
Kozol heeded the young girlës command and came to visit her a while later in a brand-new suit.
But Pineapple was not happy with the suit, which was black, just as the last one had been.
"John, I know
you get upset sometimes to see what we go through," the child said.
"But you donët have to always dress in black."
Pineappleës
appreciation for color and beauty despite her bleak conditions was one
of many instances in Kozolës career when he said he felt blessed to
know these children.
Despite his privileged upbringing and Ivy League education, Kozol noted that he never saw his work as charity.
"Iëve never felt
that Iëd collected colonial blessings in Harvard Yard and was going to
go sprinkle them on the children of the poor," he told the audience. "I
went to search for blessings and I find those blessings every single
time."
The schools
Kozol attended were generally quite underfunded, he said. While schools
in the Bronx are allotted about $11,000 per student each year, a
predominantly white school only seven minutes away receives about
$19,000 per student ÇƒÓ and "in the beautiful suburbs of Long Island,"
students are generally allotted about $22,000 each.
"We say that all
our children are of equal value in the eyes of God," Kozol said. "In
the eyes of God, my friends, Iëm sure they are. But not in the eyes of
America."
He compared the
conditions of children such as Pineapple, whom he called "Americaës
cheap children ... our Kmart babies" with those who attend costly
preparatory schools that often cost as much as $40,000 per year to
attend.
Many of his
friends send their children to such schools, he said, yet when pressed
about the issue of spending disparities between white and black
students, they often ask, "Can you really buy you way to a better
education?"
Sometimes when
heës had a couple of drinks, Kozol said he responds by saying, "I donët
know ÇƒÓ it seems to do the trick for your kids, doesnët it?"
The great
tragedy of this disparity is that many children who are very
intelligent and articulate are not getting the education they need to
apply their talents, he said.
Kozol told a
story of visiting a classroom in the Compton neighborhood of Los
Angeles, where the teacher had six 10th-grade classes daily ÇƒÓ each with
an average of 40 students.
"How the hell do you teach 40 students?" Kozol asked the teacher.
"Try," she
replied, handing him a lesson book. Kozol proceeded to spend the next
two hours with the teenagers, many of whom stayed an hour after school
to continue the discussion.
The students were extremely articulate when talking about their lives, he said, and clearly quite intelligent.
Shortly after, the students all wrote to him in a packet of letters sent by the teacher.
"I read them on the plane and my heart just sank," he said. The letters were written at a third-grade level.
"It was like seeing spirit locked in stone," he said.
The underfunding of some students is particularly sad, given the abundance of wealth in the U.S., he argued.
"If this were
Haiti, this would be understandable," Kozol said. "But weëre not a
third-world nation ÇƒÓ weëre the richest country in the world."
Some of Kozolës
harshest criticisms were directed at test-driven teaching programs,
such as the No Child Left Behind Act, the 2001 law which mandates a set
of tests that must be passed by students to qualify them to move on to
the next grade ÇƒÓ and for their schools to receive federal funding.
"The main problem is that the tests that it mandates ... are useless to our teachers," he said.
Kozol noted that
when President Bush was promoting NCLB, he argued that the tests would
give teachers an idea of where students needed help.
The problem with
this, Kozol said, is that the tests are generally administered between
January and March, but the results are not known until June ÇƒÓ when
school is over for the year.
Furthermore, he
noted, the tests "are not diagnostic. They donët tell you anything
about a childës needs." Instead, they simply give a pass/fail score.
However, Kozol
said he sees a more insidious agenda at work in the legislation. "I
think it was intended as a shaming ritual," he said. The federal
program was passed "to punish the public schools as an institution and
pave the way for private vouchers."
Furthermore, by
holding children back a grade on the basis of a single test score, the
law is making it more likely that they will eventually drop out of
school altogether, he added.
"Every time a child is held back one year, it decreases by 50 percent the chance they will graduate,"
Another problem
with the program is that while it mandates goals that must be met,
Congress has not provided adequate funding to meet those goals, he
noted.
"I have a
problem with a system that will hold a seven-year-old girl accountable
for what she has learned, but it does not hold the president and
Congress accountable for what they have denied to her."
As a result of NCLB, Kozol said, "teachers now live in a permanent state of terror and anxiety" over test scores.
This causes them
to teach to the test, rather than teaching the children in a useful,
constructive way, he argued. Everything is measured and quantified in
this new educational environment.
One of the most
absurd examples of this, he said, is a study that was conducted to
assess numerical values to the manner in which children file through
halls. The study assigned 32 values to the level of focus, orderliness
and pride exhibited by students as they walk in a line.
This, Kozol said, represents "the triumph of empirical school management."
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