3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol But for the children of the poorest people we’re stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We’re not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don’t think it works that way, and I’ve been watching this for a longtime.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there’s no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol We are now operating a school system in America that’s more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol I believe we need a national amendment which will guarantee every child in America the promise of not just an equal education but a high-quality equal education.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation’s competitive needs.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol The inequalities are greater now than in ’92. Some states have equalized per-pupil spending but they set the ‘equal level’ very low, so that wealthy districts simply raise extra money privately.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol No Child Left Behind’s fourth-grade gains aren’t learning gains, they’re testing gains. That’s why they don’t last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Kozol I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It’s blasphemy.
