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Volume 40, No. 4, Winter 2004
What happens to a dream deferred? This year marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which outlawed school segregation, the doctrine of "separate but equal." The decision galvanized the civil rights movement and brought the country one step closer to achieving Martin Luther King's dream of racial equality " ... where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers." Birthday celebrations are a time to take stock of our dreams. So, has King's dream of democracy and social justice been realized after fifty years of legislated school integration? I decided to ask Jonathan Kozol, author and activist, who has spent a lifetime writing about the education of impoverished children. Beginning with 1967 book Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools, Kozol wrote about his experiences teaching in a low-income, predominately black public school near Boston. He was fired for having the children read the poetry of African-American poet Langston Hughes. In Illiterate American (1981) he wrote about his concern about the large numbers of adults he met in very poor communities who could not read. He jumpstarted a national campaign to spur federal and private action on adult literacy. Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America (1988) is a portrait of the disenfranchised, poor who live adjacent to the some of the richest citizens of New York's 5th Avenue. Critics were unhappy with Kozol's message that American schools were separate and unequal and they demanded statistical proof. He answered by writing Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (1991), which is perhaps his most cited work. Other books by Kozol have included Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (1995) and Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope (2001). In these works, Kozol offers a portrait of daily life in an impoverished neighborhood from the perspective of its youngest residents. Stanley: Do we have cause for celebrating the 50th birthday of Brown versus the Board of Education? Kozol: Unfortunately, all the injustices cited in Brown Versus Board of Education still exist today. The current wisdom portrayed by the media is "separate schools are fine, separate can be equal." According to a recent Harvard study more black children go to segregated schools than at any time since 1968. We now have a system of apartheid that is as real as the legally enforced segregation of the southeastern United States 50 years ago. That wasn't Martin Luther King's dream where black kids go to segregated schools where they are drilled for high stakes tests. King talked about black and white children sitting at the table of brotherhood. Why are there so many segregated schools named Martin Luther King? Stanley: Do people really want integrated schools? Don't parents prefer sending their children to neighborhood schools? Kozol: If you believe the experts on TV they always say "black folks don't believe in integration any more. All they want is good neighborhood schools with black role models." That statement is wrong. Statistically the vast majority of black parents overwhelmingly believe that their children will receive a better education in a racially integrated school. They also believe that they will find it easier to enter the mainstream of American life later on. Also, for the first time in America, the majority of white people believe their children will be better off in a racially integrated public school. This is not the message we get from the media and politicians. The message we get from TV is that separate is o.k. and we are going to make schools equal, not with money, not with lower class sizes, not with more high quality teachers, but with more testing. No one is mad about this? No one wants to talk about racism. I want to talk about this. I am too old to change my stripes. I consider segregated education in a democratic nation an abomination and I intend to keep on saying this to my dying day. Stanley: Can you give us some specific examples of the inequities you observe in urban schools? Kozol: The schools are increasingly segregated and unequal. In the South Bronx, there about 11,000 school children. Only 26 are white, the rest are children of color. In other words, the South Bronx schools are 99.8% children of color. In New York, we spend $8,000 a year for public education for each of these children. Suburbs spend about $12,000 to educate each of their children. Rich suburbs pay $18,000 to $20,00 per child. Another example had to do with class size inequity. The inner city schools are so different now that students are not aware what the mainstream of society is like. Wealthy schools I visit typically have 16 to 18 students in a class. When I visited a second grade class in a suburban school, it had 16 students with 3 grownups in one room. There was a teacher, student teacher, and a literacy paraprofessional. By contrast, an inner city, segregated high school I visited in Los Angeles had forty students with one teacher. A Latina student asked me, "Why doesn't anyone care about us?" We say all of America's children are equal in the eyes of God, yet we tolerate having cheap children in poor neighborhoods. Stanley: Why are you so passionate about affording children access to universal preschool? Kozol: During the past ten years in the South Bronx, I have worked with children who face daily hunger, illness, and violence. Less than one fourth of these children are able to go to an under-funded Headstart preschool. If they do go to preschool they enter already two to three years behind affluent white children. The very wealthy parents in New York enroll their children in preschools as early as age two. These top grade preschools, known as the "little Ivey's" because they are the first step to entering Ivey league colleges, can cost over $20,000 a year and offer enriching literacy programs that are relaxing and joyful. So what happens when children take the high stakes exams in third grade? Who do you think scores best? Some of the affluent children have already had seven years of schooling before taking the test. It is outrageous to pose so many high stakes tests on children in the early grades if they have been first been denied appropriate preschool education. It is deeply hypocritical for a society to hold a little child, 7 or 8 years-old, accountable for performance on a standardized exam, but not to hold accountable the high officials of government for robbing the children of the preschool education they gave their own children 5 years earlier. Stanley: Let's talk a little about reading? Do you believe in teaching phonics? Kozol: As a teacher I taught phonics. I believe in teaching phonics so long as it doesn't asphyxiate the curriculum and drive out everything else. I am critical of some of the commercial, scripted reading programs that take away the teacher's creativity and the children's joy of learning. Also, you need to be cautious because politicians often like to change the subject away from the real issue of providing equal education access for poor children to phonics. Nobody wants to talk about the grim reality of apartheid in this country, so they change the subject to phonics or reading methods. I call this tactic "the gifted evasion on the central point." It's hypocritical to debate methodology when the school is crumbling and the kids don't have access to quality education with high quality teachers. Stanley: What suggestions do you have for improving the quality of education for America's poorest students? How can we even the playing field? Kozol: Starting no later than age 3, preschool education needs to be a top priority. This should be a national guarantee of a civilized society. The program should not be the skimpy 2½ hour program we give the poor but a full day of enriching curriculum, such as the children of the rich now receives. We need to lower class sizes in poor schools. Next, most importantly we need to insure that teachers in our poor urban schools are of the highest quality. Teachers need to come to school with a sense of energy, feelings of joy, and satisfaction. Therefore Washington and state capitols need to stop besieging and beating down teachers with punitive demands to pump up the test scores at the cost of every other aspect of enlightened education. Today because of an obsession with testing, teachers are sacrificing almost every element of whim, humor, merriment, and sheer delight in children's personalities. Our best teachers will not stay in these schools where the sole purpose is to drill children to be good examination soldiers. Teachers will gravitate to the richer suburban schools where there is creativity, originality, and pleasure in authentic learning. Stanley: Can we really expect testing to disappear? Kozol: I am not a dewy eyed romantic who believes tests can be derided or ignored. Children need to be well armed to survive the competition they face in school and life. However, I believe the testing pressures have become unhealthy and obsessional. Also, a distinction needs to be made between diagnostic tests and standardized tests. For example, diagnostic reading tests serve a valuable role of identifying children's strengths and weaknesses and can guide instruction. Standardized tests often have no other function than to stigmatize and retroactively humiliate a class, a school, or school district. I wish politicians and educators who advocate high stakes testing were required to spend a two full weeks a year in schools to see the humiliation and stress they are inflicting. Stanley: You visit a lot of schools both poor and affluent. What are you seeing lately? Kozol: Unfortunately, I am seeing a grave danger caused by high stakes testing. We are instituting two separate kinds of education for two separate socioeconomic classes in our public schools. For many of the inner city children I write about I see a grim, severe, drill based curriculum with rote, unreflective instruction as the order of the day. Teachers are required to adhere to scripted lesson plans, which takes almost every moment of a child's education. Some schools now are actually requiring teachers to keep a timer with a buzzer to insure no time is wasted. No sudden moment of spontaneity or intellectual surprise can be allowed to interrupt the schedule of the day. In the suburban, more affluent communities, a deeper more capacious, non-indoctrination education is taking place. There is a richer brand of education, where joy, curiosity, and critical thinking capacities are not suppressed. Children learn not just the technical proficiencies that will be measured by exams but also independent consciousness, and moral confidence to make authentic judgments as discerning citizens. We are denying that to children in the poorer schools and they are destined to become robotic rodents that will not ask questions. In short, currently in our supposedly democratic society we "train" the poor, the children of color for narrowly prescribed roles. We "educate" the rich for the inheritance of culture. Stanley: Who are some of your heroes? Kozol: Fred Rogers, of Mister's Roger's Neighborhood, who died this past year, was one of my beloved and dearest friends. He visited with me the poor children of the South Bronx. He rode the subway with me to some pretty scary and rough neighborhoods. He was immediately recognizable even in the ghetto. I remember one incident where a guy driving his truck on the street, stopped right in traffic to give Mr. Rogers a hug and lift him up off of the street. You know when Mr. Rogers talked to the kids he never once asked them about their test scores. I still to this day keep Mr. Rogers phone number hoping some day he will answer my phone call. Also, I feel very close to teachers, especially the ones who work with little children in the early elementary grades. I think they do the best thing in life; to bring joy and beauty to kids and love, mystery, and magic to the hearts of little pint sized people.
Resources for Teaching Children Tolerance
Nile Stanley is the Chair of the Childhood Education Department at the University of North Florida. He may be reached at nstanley@unf.edu.
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