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A review by cocoonofbooks
Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools by Jonathan Kozol
4.0
3.5 stars. I know, I know, this is a well-known classic of nonfiction that has stood the test of time. And by no means do I disagree with his premise — since the time that I was in high school 15 years ago, I've been making the argument that funding public education with property taxes leads to entrenched inequalities, and that was without knowing the ways in which state and federal funding utterly fail to rectify the differences. But holy goodness, talk about beating a dead horse. This could have been a powerful magazine article or — if written 20 years later — an eminently shareable blog post. But instead we get a book that says basically the same thing over and over again for six chapters, until I could practically write a chapter myself.
"Take Big City X. At Poor Area High School, there is a large hole in the ceiling of the entryway. Most of the toilets don't work and there is no toilet paper. The gym is unusable because the flooring has been torn up, but due to overcrowding there are now four classes being held in there anyway. Class sizes average 35 students, and all the students are black and Hispanic. The library has about 200 books that are all from the 1960s and before. The graduation rate is about 50% and only about 50 students of 5000 will apply to college.
"Five minutes down the street / across the tracks / up the hill is Rich Area High School. It has six gyms and a 'study lounge' and a 'music suite.' Students can take classes in 'geology' and 'music theory' and 'obscure literature of the 17th century.' Class sizes average 18 students, and the student body is 90% white and 9% Asian, with three black kids who are in all remedial classes. The library has 20,000 volumes, and 99% of students graduate, many going to Ivy League schools. Whereas Poor Area High School spends $1,000 per pupil, Rich Area High School spends $10,000."
Don't get me wrong — it's important to draw attention to the degree of disparity that exists. And I'm glad Kozol has done so in such sharp contrast. But I don't need a rinse and repeat in ten different cities to get the point.
What Kozol does do well is to show just how entitled and racist white suburban parents can be when it comes to trying to rectify these disparities. From protests to court cases, anytime major action has been taken to try to give poor districts enough money to function decently, all the rich people get up in arms about the "Robin Hoods" who are trying to make their precious children mediocre. Kozol talks in unflinching terms about how affluent white Americans believe that education is adequate for poor minority children as long as it teaches them enough basics to hold down a minimum-wage job, even going so far as to imply that they are so uncultured that they wouldn't know what to do even if they had better facilities and so innately stupid that they wouldn't learn anything from better teachers.
It's hard to read, even more so because I know it to be true from my own experience. Kozol highlights New Trier High as the cream of the crop in the Chicago suburbs, but that's probably only because my high school hadn't been built yet. When it was, it was the most expensive high school to be built in the state. And while I'm grateful for the education I received, I hate the idea that it came at the expense (literally) of other students in other parts of the state. But even my very liberal mother disagreed with me on this, telling me that they paid to live in an expensive area so I could have the education I did, as if those born into poverty, whose children are born into poverty, just decided not to make the same "choice." Kozol returns to this idea of choice again and again, because it's an argument used often to assert that districts should retain control of their own schools from top to bottom so that "local choice" can play a role in how the school is designed. But as Kozol points out, the only choice that the poorest districts have is "negative choice": deciding whether to do without a nurse or a counselor, a gym or a lunchroom.
So I'm fully on board with Kozol's thesis, and I think that he makes his points well, even if he does it ad nauseam. But the other thing that grated on me the entire time I was reading was Kozol's writing style. He quotes a lot of people — so much so that at times it felt like passages were just strung-together quotations — but some of them get names and some of them don't, and there's rarely an explanation given for the difference (e.g., "a teacher said on condition of anonymity"). In at least one spot (p. 216) there's an entire paragraph in quotes that's given no context whatsoever (though this may have been a Kindle formatting error). And many of the people are quoted as speaking in multiple, uninterrupted paragraphs, making many of the same points and using the same language that Kozol uses in his narrative, which makes me think either they were highly edited or Kozol was just scribbling notes in a notebook and then reconstructed them into sentences later. This is in sharp contrast to the way he quotes written materials, where he denotes any kind of editing with ellipses, including oftentimes, unnecessarily, at the end of a passage. And some quotations are just baffling, such as, "Morris High School in the South Bronx, for example, says a teacher who has taught here more than 20 years, 'does everything an inanimate object can do to keep children from being educated.'" Who is speaking? The building?
Finally, I appreciate what Kozol was doing with his narrow focus on funding — and indeed, he argues well that those who say money doesn't make a difference are the same people not willing to redistribute any of their own money —but I also think he could have taken some of the space he used reiterating the same things over and over again and devoted it to a broader view of the factors that go into a quality education. He argues that giving districts more money, for example, would allow them to attract higher quality teachers, but I know from reading [b:Radical: Fighting to Put Students First|15818541|Radical Fighting to Put Students First|Michelle Rhee|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1353428372s/15818541.jpg|21546177] that there are other factors at play; when Michelle Rhee got outside funding to attract a huge number of would-be instructors in New York City, she discovered that there were hiring regulations and timelines that were stifling the recruitment within cities and losing many candidates to the suburbs. And I know from my own experience that being in a well-funded high school by no means guarantees quality teachers who understand their subject matter. (Kozol does make the point that affluent areas can better deal with a handful of poor teachers because they can afford tutoring for their kids, but he doesn't seem to believe that teachers in poorer districts would need to be held to any kind of standard as long as we could pay them more.)
Despite my problems with the book, I do see why it's considered a seminal work on this topic, and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't already spent the better part of two decades thinking and arguing about this very thing. I doubt he's changed the minds of anyone who already had a firm stance going in, but for anyone who's never given much thought to disparities in public education funding, this is definitely worth reading as an introduction.
"Take Big City X. At Poor Area High School, there is a large hole in the ceiling of the entryway. Most of the toilets don't work and there is no toilet paper. The gym is unusable because the flooring has been torn up, but due to overcrowding there are now four classes being held in there anyway. Class sizes average 35 students, and all the students are black and Hispanic. The library has about 200 books that are all from the 1960s and before. The graduation rate is about 50% and only about 50 students of 5000 will apply to college.
"Five minutes down the street / across the tracks / up the hill is Rich Area High School. It has six gyms and a 'study lounge' and a 'music suite.' Students can take classes in 'geology' and 'music theory' and 'obscure literature of the 17th century.' Class sizes average 18 students, and the student body is 90% white and 9% Asian, with three black kids who are in all remedial classes. The library has 20,000 volumes, and 99% of students graduate, many going to Ivy League schools. Whereas Poor Area High School spends $1,000 per pupil, Rich Area High School spends $10,000."
Don't get me wrong — it's important to draw attention to the degree of disparity that exists. And I'm glad Kozol has done so in such sharp contrast. But I don't need a rinse and repeat in ten different cities to get the point.
What Kozol does do well is to show just how entitled and racist white suburban parents can be when it comes to trying to rectify these disparities. From protests to court cases, anytime major action has been taken to try to give poor districts enough money to function decently, all the rich people get up in arms about the "Robin Hoods" who are trying to make their precious children mediocre. Kozol talks in unflinching terms about how affluent white Americans believe that education is adequate for poor minority children as long as it teaches them enough basics to hold down a minimum-wage job, even going so far as to imply that they are so uncultured that they wouldn't know what to do even if they had better facilities and so innately stupid that they wouldn't learn anything from better teachers.
It's hard to read, even more so because I know it to be true from my own experience. Kozol highlights New Trier High as the cream of the crop in the Chicago suburbs, but that's probably only because my high school hadn't been built yet. When it was, it was the most expensive high school to be built in the state. And while I'm grateful for the education I received, I hate the idea that it came at the expense (literally) of other students in other parts of the state. But even my very liberal mother disagreed with me on this, telling me that they paid to live in an expensive area so I could have the education I did, as if those born into poverty, whose children are born into poverty, just decided not to make the same "choice." Kozol returns to this idea of choice again and again, because it's an argument used often to assert that districts should retain control of their own schools from top to bottom so that "local choice" can play a role in how the school is designed. But as Kozol points out, the only choice that the poorest districts have is "negative choice": deciding whether to do without a nurse or a counselor, a gym or a lunchroom.
So I'm fully on board with Kozol's thesis, and I think that he makes his points well, even if he does it ad nauseam. But the other thing that grated on me the entire time I was reading was Kozol's writing style. He quotes a lot of people — so much so that at times it felt like passages were just strung-together quotations — but some of them get names and some of them don't, and there's rarely an explanation given for the difference (e.g., "a teacher said on condition of anonymity"). In at least one spot (p. 216) there's an entire paragraph in quotes that's given no context whatsoever (though this may have been a Kindle formatting error). And many of the people are quoted as speaking in multiple, uninterrupted paragraphs, making many of the same points and using the same language that Kozol uses in his narrative, which makes me think either they were highly edited or Kozol was just scribbling notes in a notebook and then reconstructed them into sentences later. This is in sharp contrast to the way he quotes written materials, where he denotes any kind of editing with ellipses, including oftentimes, unnecessarily, at the end of a passage. And some quotations are just baffling, such as, "Morris High School in the South Bronx, for example, says a teacher who has taught here more than 20 years, 'does everything an inanimate object can do to keep children from being educated.'" Who is speaking? The building?
Finally, I appreciate what Kozol was doing with his narrow focus on funding — and indeed, he argues well that those who say money doesn't make a difference are the same people not willing to redistribute any of their own money —but I also think he could have taken some of the space he used reiterating the same things over and over again and devoted it to a broader view of the factors that go into a quality education. He argues that giving districts more money, for example, would allow them to attract higher quality teachers, but I know from reading [b:Radical: Fighting to Put Students First|15818541|Radical Fighting to Put Students First|Michelle Rhee|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1353428372s/15818541.jpg|21546177] that there are other factors at play; when Michelle Rhee got outside funding to attract a huge number of would-be instructors in New York City, she discovered that there were hiring regulations and timelines that were stifling the recruitment within cities and losing many candidates to the suburbs. And I know from my own experience that being in a well-funded high school by no means guarantees quality teachers who understand their subject matter. (Kozol does make the point that affluent areas can better deal with a handful of poor teachers because they can afford tutoring for their kids, but he doesn't seem to believe that teachers in poorer districts would need to be held to any kind of standard as long as we could pay them more.)
Despite my problems with the book, I do see why it's considered a seminal work on this topic, and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't already spent the better part of two decades thinking and arguing about this very thing. I doubt he's changed the minds of anyone who already had a firm stance going in, but for anyone who's never given much thought to disparities in public education funding, this is definitely worth reading as an introduction.