Education activist Jonathan Kozol offered some staggering statistics to his Rhode Island College audience last Thursday afternoon.
“The average black or Hispanic twelfth-grade student reads at a typical white seventh-grader’s level. Drop-out rates of black and Hispanic students have worsened since the 1980s. Schools in the Bronx, N.Y., have 32 students in a classroom. New York white suburbs cap their quota at 18 children per class.”
Kozol is a writer and education activist. He is the author of over ten works including, “Savage Inequalities” and “Letters to a Young Teacher.” He spoke in Roberts Hall Auditorium on the afternoon of Oct. 23. The event, “Joy & Justice: An Invitation to the Young to Serve the Children of the Poor,” was organized by the Feinstein School of Education & Human Development.
Dean Roger Eldridge began the afternoon by welcoming a full auditorium to the event. Bennett Lombardo, a RIC professor of physical education, introduced Kozol.
“Kozol is an advocate for social justice and fairness to children everywhere, and I am happy to present him to you today,” Lombardo said.
Kozol took the podium and asked the audience, “How many teachers or aspiring teachers are here?” More than half of the auditorium raised their hands. “I feel much safer,” Kozol smiled. “Teachers are my heroes.”
He began by offering a comparison between white suburban schooling and inner-city education in America. In the poor industrial sector of Pennsylvania, school systems spend just $9,000 per student each year. Two-thirds of those students are black or Hispanic. In Pennsylvania white suburbs, $19,000 is spent on one child in a year.
“These kids eventually realize they’re not valued as much by America,” Kozol said. “Black and Hispanic kids are more isolated intellectually and segregated physically now than in any year since 1968.”
It was during the 1960s that Kozol found his path in life. He was inspired by the mission of Martin Luther King Jr.
“I was living in Harvard Square when I decided to become involved in the civil rights movement,” Kozol recalled. He drove to Roxbury, the local black community, and asked an Episcopal pastor the best way he could help the cause.
“‘Become a teacher,’ he told me. ‘Our kids don’t have enough teachers committed to their cause.’”
Kozol became a fourth grade substitute teacher in the decrepit buildings of the inner-city Boston Public School System.
“My fourth graders had had 12 teachers in the two years before me. I was number 13. One day in the spring, I got a book of Langston Hughes’s poetry, and brought it into the class. One little girl in the front row turned to the girl next to her and said, ‘Look, that man’s colored.’”
Another girl, who was typically very stand-offish with Kozol, moved to the front of the classroom and thanked him. The next day, Kozol was fired.
“According to the ‘standard list,’ Hughes was an eighth grade poet, not a fourth grade one. So I was out. The parents were so mad, however, that they had the school shut down for the next day, and eventually they forced the whole Boston Public School System to follow suit.”
Kozol argued that American education today has not even achieved the goals of Plessey v. Ferguson, the 1896 court case that stated American schools would be “separate but equal.”
“Our schools are separate, but who would dare to argue they’re equal? We’re not even up to Plessey v. Ferguson in 2009.”
Kozol said he is still invited to dinner parties by friends in New York City, although he does not understand why. “They [the hosts] are nervous I’ll say something like, ‘How do you feel about living in the most segregated city in America?’ They secretly think I want to redistribute their wealth, which I do.”
Regarding government regulations on education, Kozol said that the No Child Left Behind Act takes the joy out of learning. “It’s a test-driven, rigid, military method of instruction. It’s as if America leaves happiness to children in the suburbs. Inner city kids can’t afford it.”
The social justice activist still visits white suburban schools, to continue to compare the radical difference in education across racial boundaries.
“Kids in those schools are allowed to express themselves and ask tough, shrewd questions. In the inner city, we don’t want kids to ask too many questions. There’s no time, and because eventually they may even begin to question the justice of their own society.”
Kozol’s presentation was accompanied by an American Sign Language interpreter. A question and answer session was held after the presentation in Alger Hall. Books were available for purchase during the event, and Kozol held a signing session following his speech.
Jonathan Kozol speaks to RIC students about social justice
Published: Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Updated: Tuesday, October 27, 2009
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