Jonathan Kozol is one of the leading critics of the U.S. education system. He has written a series of widely acclaimed books across a 60-year career, including Savage Inequalities, The Shame of the Nation, and Letters to a Young Teacher. Here, he discusses his new book An End to Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America, which sums up his argument about what is wrong with public schools and what we can do about it.
jonathan kozol
I’d like to start by giving you a sense of the essence of my new book. The public schools in the United States today are an ethical embarrassment and a betrayal of democracy, not only because of the glaringly unequal way we fund our public schools, but, at this moment of so much racial tension in America, because of the seemingly eternal segregation of the schools and the brutalizing toll this takes on Black and Latino children for no fault of their own. With school segregation right now at its highest level since the early 1990s, the nation has eviscerated the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and ripped apart the dream of Dr. King.
Apartheid education is like the big white elephant in the middle of the room that we pretend that we can’t see. None of the cycles of highly publicized urban school reform that come and go from year to year and temporarily make the headlines—and I’ve seen probably two dozen of them in my career—have made the slightest difference in the outcomes of the schools where a vicious code of discipline takes the place of anything like democratic learning. The refusal of the powerful—and I don’t mean simply political conservatives, but also the refusal of too many timid liberals, what I call semi-liberals—to batter down the walls between two separate worlds of education has resulted in what I call the routine amputation of potential of millions of our most vulnerable children.
I began by teaching in a classic segregated school, and I’ve probably visited more than a hundred similar schools all over the country, but I’ve also visited the good suburban schools for contrast. While the children in the best suburban schools are allowed to learn out of a healthy appetite for learning, to pursue their curiosities, and to ask discerning questions, the children with whom I’ve been working in the inner-city schools are all too often compelled to learn out of a sense of fear of failure and punishment. And in my book, as you’ve already seen, I describe some of the Draconian punishments that most Americans appear not to want to recognize—lockdown rooms, for example, for minor misbehaviors, for little kids. I walked into a segregated school in Boston where a child who misbehaved in the most limited way, with no danger to anyone, who just slowed down the pace of learning, was put in a storage closet in the hallway. They euphemistically called it the “calm down room.” But lockdowns aren’t the worst. Physical abuse is shockingly common. Corporal punishment is still allowed in 23 states.
Perhaps the worst is the frequency of juvenile arrest, of calling in the police on a child who might be only 6 or 7 years old. I describe a little girl in Orlando, Florida, a Black child who was 6, and she had a mild tantrum in class, which, in a good school, could be dealt with by a counselor or a psychologist. Instead, they called in the police, and they put her in [restraints] and dragged her off to a detention center.
So, about these cycles of reform that come and go, the latest one is phonics. We rediscovered phonics as a magic answer to all our problems about two years ago. But that’s just one example of what I mean, things like [the 1983 report] “A Nation at Risk,” No Child Left Behind, Common Core, etc. The intention of these efforts is somehow to prove that separate need not be unequal, that you can have good separate schools. I call it the search for perfectible apartheid, a term that a lot of people don’t like. The point is, it hasn’t worked. Are you familiar with the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones?
Nathan j. robinson
Yes, I’ve read some of her work.
kozol
Hannah-Jones is a writer for the New York Times, and in an interview, she was asked, if these reforms don’t work, what does work? And she answered with a single word, and that word was: integration. It’s possible. It’s not unthinkable, even today in America. I mentioned this in the book: here in the Boston area, there’s a spectacularly successful but little known integration program in which thousands of Black and Latino kids from segregated sections of the city ride the bus to more than 30 terrific, well-funded suburban districts, and the results are remarkable. Unheard of statistics in the inner city: 95 percent of the kids in the program graduate from high school in four years, and virtually all of them go on to four-year colleges. So, even by the toughest measurable standards, they’re achieving at a level that’s virtually unheard of in the inner city. The program is also very carefully curated to be sure that it never subtracts from the racial identity of the children, that it respects their racial identity. So, that’s a summary of where I stand right now.
Just to make one more point: this is not a foreign country—Massachusetts is a little more liberal than the rest of the nation—but you would think that people would look at this and say, let’s replicate that and do that elsewhere. But political leaders in Washington have refused to see this kind of program as a model for the nation. Why? Because it requires bussing, and bussing is a scare word for ambitious politicians. President Biden, sad to say, had a powerful role ever since his Senate years in placing a stigma on that word. Today, he claims he believes in integration, but he’s still opposed to one of the few ways by which to make it possible. And I hate to say this, but cumulatively, over the years, he has done more harm to the cause of integration than even the overtly racist Donald Trump. I’ll still vote for [the Democratic candidate], of course, inevitably, but not without a sense of shame that we have no more noble, more visionary choices.
Robinson
You’ve laid out with some passionate intensity some of the horrors that we inflict on children: as you say, the amputation of potential and the stark differences between the schools that are given to our poorest children, particularly Black and Latino children, and the schools that more affluent white children go to. You have, in the course of your career, visited many schools at both ends of the spectrum. You’ve described a little bit what happens in the worst schools with these punitive measures, but if we’re thinking about the kind of schools that embody this ideal of democratic learning, in your observations of all these schools, what makes a good school? What is the kind of school that every child should be entitled to?
kozol
I would start by saying a school in which all the children are allowed to take some joy in learning, where they’re not compelled to swallow the accepted verities, and where they can laugh and smile and whisper to each other or look out the window at a squirrel without the sword of punishment above their heads, such as what I hear in inner-city schools: “You’re in red zone,” meaning some kind of bad place in the teacher’s estimation. Also, a school where children are not perceived as just so many little economic units to be groomed to find their place in the corporate society but are given the tools they’re going to need to thrive and flourish through their adult years as creative citizens, as citizens above all else, and clear-thinking citizens. Finally, I would say, a school where wonderful teachers are not compelled to give up all their autonomy and suppress their personalities to conform to what I call a standardized banality.
Quick example: here in Massachusetts, there’s an industrial town called Lawrence, and the students there are almost all either Dominican or Puerto Rican or else Black. And a classic situation—I’ve seen this elsewhere—is when a sixth grade teacher’s classroom is invaded by three so-called experts from a private foundation, a private corporation. They were brought into the school to stiffen up the behavior of the teachers, to get them to be more stern and didactic with the children. So, they’re sitting in the back of her classroom, and she has to wear an earpiece so they can talk to her while she’s teaching, and they tell her: you look too happy; you’re smiling too much; don’t move from leg to leg—she’s told to stand in something called Mountain Pose. And one of the little boys in her class notices the earpiece, and he says, “What’s that thing you’re wearing in your ear?” And the experts tell her, “Don’t answer him, and if he asks again, give him a detention.” I love kids who are politely audacious. The boy stands up, and he says to the teacher, “Don’t listen to them, listen to me. You’re a person, teacher. Be a person. Be you.” I love that. But that’s just an example of this sort of business-driven corporate trend that’s driving good teachers out of the classroom.
Most of the wonderful teachers I know, and I know a lot of them, didn’t come into education out of a wish to be a classroom cop. They want to seed the lives of their children with exhilaration and joy and humor about learning. There are plenty of great teachers, but I’m sure you’re familiar with the fact that there’s a terrible flight of teachers now from our public schools.
robinson
Yes. One of the primary targets of your criticism is the kind of method that emphasizes obedience, regimentation, and quantification. You point out that when you started teaching, the wisdom was something like that slogan, “every day we must obey.” They don’t say it quite that explicitly now, but they devised all sorts of other systems, some of which are very complicated, like when you describe the various levels of conversation that are allowed, or the misbehavior tax, all kinds of bureaucratic language where the entire purpose is to regiment and discipline the children.
kozol
Yes. There are these corporate foundations which are coming into the public schools—I call it the corporate invasion. They’re coming in as alleged experts, and one of them had this thing about levels of permissible conversation for children. There was level one, level two, level three, and I think level four was regular speech and conversation, which was forbidden. And in lunchrooms, where there might be six classes having lunch simultaneously, no one is allowed to talk. Total rule of silence. One of the Harvard professors I know went and asked the principal of the school why they all had to be silent. He said, it’s to give them a rest in the middle of the day, something like that. She said, facetiously, it didn’t seem much like a rest, it seemed more like a prison.
And then, in a middle-class suburb within 20 minutes of Boston, in a town like the one where I grew up, it’s fun to come into the classroom, and the kids look forward to Monday morning—not all of them, but most of them. They look forward to what’s going to happen on Monday morning, and the teachers are relaxed and not uptight. In the inner city, I often feel that teachers are trained to see the children as adversaries, as the enemies of the state, to borrow from Orwell.
robinson
One of the arguments that would be made in favor of a punitive approach is that we have to have harsh discipline, or these “zero tolerance” or “no excuses” policies, because this is the foundation of learning, and that actually children succeed more when you have this kind of regimentation. But what you’re pointing out is that in these affluent schools, this is not the approach taken. The best schools that you have visited do not treat the children like they’re prisoners to be controlled.
kozol
Absolutely. That’s the point. The “no excuses” ethos, to me, is just incompatible with the best virtues of the United States of America, if we would simply honor those virtues. “No excuses” education sounds like Stalinist Russia or Germany, maybe, in the 1930s. It’s an intolerant cruelty. And it’s not just no excuses, but it’s no independent thinking. That’s the point. It’s like they’re afraid to let the children interrogate reality. I use that term because it’s not merely to ask questions like, why is the sky blue? but to challenge the world in which we grow up and to be a part of its transformation when we’re adults. I worry about having a generation of voters who are trained to absolute obedience. What do they do when they’re faced with tyrannical leaders?
Anyway, a month or two ago, The New York Times sent a reporter up to Cambridge to interview me, and she actually did a very nice and favorable portrait of my book and my career, and I was grateful. But one moment stands out in my memory: the reporter asked me, “Why do you need to use scathing terms like apartheid education instead of more moderate and conciliatory language?” And I’m sure others will ask that as well. All my life, I’ve been asked that kind of question. But to be honest, especially at my present age, I just don’t have time to steer away from accurate and forceful words.
There was a great New Englander, one of the most famous abolitionists, named William Lloyd Garrison. He was a white man and lived in a town north of Boston. Ultimately, the most important abolitionist was Frederick Douglass, but Garrison helped set the way. Somebody asked him once, Why, William, are you all on fire? And he answered, I have need to be on fire. There are mountains of ice about me I must melt. I wouldn’t dare compare myself to Garrison, but I thought that was the good American spirit of independent thinking. I don’t think that was subversive. If it was subversive of slavery, then that was a good time to be subversive.
robinson
Certainly. Garrison said he would be as harsh as truth. You’re not going to get that question around here because I believe very strongly that injustice should make you angry. The first time I went to the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, I was giving a talk, and it made me angry because I saw how lovely it was. It was like Harvard Yard, and it was a high school. I wasn’t angry at the kids there. They were really nice. But I realized that the spectrum of the experience of school runs from something that is as lovely as the Harvard Yard for some of these private schools to something that really is, as you point out, basically indistinguishable from prisons, or perhaps even worse. You document the way that children are poisoned at some of these schools that are in disrepair. The buildings are falling apart, with bathrooms that they won’t even let the adults use because they’re so disgusting. At one school you visited, they said, No, use the guest bathroom.
kozol
That’s right. I describe schools that are not just ugly and decrepit, which is bad enough because that sours the mentalities of children, but where lead paint is crumbling from the walls and ceilings. We’ve known certainly since the 1970s that lead paint exposure, when children breathe it in, or in some cases, chew the flakes, does irreversible damage, often to their cerebral function, and there’s no way to ever make up for that later on. Once that happens, that year of your life is gone forever. You’re never going to get that year again to live in a healthier environment and to study in a place that’s not going to damage you.
I’ve never seen poisonous flaking lead paint in the good suburban schools I visit. It’s not just that they’re respectful of the children’s basic elemental health and safety, but they spend enough money so that it’s a charming place and a likable place, not unlike the school you mentioned, Andover Phillips Academy, which I know very well, and Exeter, its rival school, and Groton, and the similar exceptionally well-known and justly famous prep schools attended by generations of privileged people. Some of these private schools are willing to spend the money not just to make the school building attractive, but they often have art galleries with priceless art—not simply galleries for the children’s art but for classic works that graduates probably donate to the school. I say this because the old question that I’ve been asked by conservatives ever since I started teaching in 1964 is the following: does money really matter in the determination of a good school? And I always say, of course it does. If it didn’t matter, why do you think I specifically say this? Why do you think that schools like Andover, where the children of presidents go to school, are willing to spend so much money to create a stimulating and often beautiful environment? I often say that ugly settings cheapen the souls of children; beautiful environments refine their souls. So, there are two worlds of education in America. I’m getting pretty old, but to my dying day, I’m not going to give up on this struggle.
robinson
It seems to me that one of the values underlying your work is this belief that the poorest children deserve the best as well, that nobody should be given up on, and that, in fact, if anything, we should spend more on the children who have the least because those are the ones who have the most obstacles to overcome. The children of presidents might need to be invested in a little less.
I want to turn to the path forward. You mentioned bussing programs. But surely that can only be a partial solution because ultimately, we want all schools to be brought up to the level of the best.
kozol
Yes, that’s true. I won’t go off on a long detour about this, but I’m determined. I’ve always at least urged political allies here in Massachusetts and other states not simply to expand a one-way bussing program from the city to the suburbs but to develop at least a ring of spectacular magnet schools on the edges of the inner city which are so good that kids will be eager to make the ride in reverse, essentially to create what I would call a metropolitan school district, which might include as many as 25 districts, including the inner city itself. And in cities like Boston, New York, or Chicago—I’ll just to speak for Boston because that’s where I live—with all its world-class medical facilities, health research, scientific labs, and extraordinary museums, imagine what it would be like if you created a school that was identified with one of those institutions, like the Massachusetts General Hospital School of Life Science. I think, with ingenuity and imagination and ethical audacity, we could crack open this hardened shell of racial isolation.
It wouldn’t be so hard. It would take a president who would authorize and even devote the huge amount of funding it would take to make this a reality. I said I knew enough about Joe Biden’s background. I met him when he was in the Senate. He once invited me to his home. Yes, he probably will think I’m not grateful now, but that was before I knew much about his politics. He invited me to his home to give a talk on adult literacy because his wife was a volunteer, and he’s a very nice man. He gave me cookies and milk, I recall, as I sat in his kitchen afterward with him. And he is likable. That’s the trouble. He’s likable, but there’s something ethically missing, and I just hope someday we’ll have another president maybe with leadership as high-minded as FDR, for example.
I hark back to Franklin Roosevelt partly because I can remember the day he died. I’m old enough. I remember that day. I remember my mother crying in the kitchen, but I don’t want to get lost in nostalgia. I think this is a great country, and I think we deserve great leadership.
robinson
I was just looking back at another old book of yours, which is called Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the Cuban Schools. One of the things you talk about is that Cuba, after the Cuban Revolution, made a national commitment to literacy. And for whatever serious criticisms we might have of Castro’s Cuba, the idea that every child deserves that education was taken seriously. It was a massive national project. You point out that in the United States, we’ve never done or said that we’re going to embark on a collective mission to make sure that every child has their basic needs met and their basic rights fulfilled. There have been many promises that we will invest in building schools, and then somehow it always gets cut from the legislation and put to the wayside.
kozol
Typically, what happens is they appoint a commission to look into that, to look into the matter of unequal funding, or to look into the matter of lead paint in inner-city schools, and the commission then is given 10 years to come up with a report or something like that. That’s kind of a classic urban political ritual. The thing is, we don’t need to look to Cuba. There are plenty of other nations where the education of children, particularly very young children, is a very high priority. France, for example. It’s just embarrassing that in the United States, almost since I became a teacher, successive presidential candidates have promised that if they’re elected, we will have universal preschool or Head Start, and every one of them has broken that promise to the present day. I’m going to be 88 in the fall, and I don’t expect to live long enough to see the transformations for which I’ve struggled over the past 60 years. What I hope is that a younger generation of thoughtfully rebellious young people, students, and their teachers will carry on the torch.
Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.
