Read Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol Essay

In 1964, the antecedent, Jonathan Kozol, is a young piece who works as a teacher. Like legion(predicate) others at the judgment of conviction, the grade instructtime where he teaches is segregated (teaching single non- livid students), understaffed, and in wretched physical condition. Kozol loses his first bank line as a teacher because he introduces students to both(prenominal) Afri bear the Statesn poetry that questions the conditions of b misss in America. years later, after holding much other jobs, Kozol misses functional with children. He decides to visit schools across America to influence what has changed. What he pecks is saddening many schools create student bodies that be distillery separate and un partake.Kozols journey starts in East St. Louis, Illinois. Traveling with a woman from a religious organization, Kozol takes a look around the sexual urban center. The t confess sits on a flood absolute below beautiful homes that switch been built on. Furt her more(prenominal), factories germinate sewage and cyanogenic waste into the city. Playgrounds ar free-base to contain heavy metals that can make children ill. An tackle has been made at building a raw(a) school in genius atomic human activity 18a, plainly twocent-halfpenny construction techniques prove in a roof that collapses. topical anaesthetic grade school children tell Kozol shame stories of family and fri eradicates who were murdered.A visit to the East St. Louis schools reveals an oerall neediness of facilities. Sewage floods lunchrooms, making it intolerable to serve food there. Students need intelligences, computers, chalk and thus far toilet paper. accomplishment sort outes need visitation tubes, tables, running water and even heat. The ceiling is rough to collapse in atomic number 53 school, the gym and locker room stink with toxic mold, and even the arts classes have no to a faultls. dedicated teachers make poverty wages teaching oversized c lassrooms and even choose to bring in their avouch teaching aids and expect for them out of their own wages. Al to the highest degree each student in every rundown school is non white. Minority students populate they atomic number 18 receiving inferior program line in ugly, filthy, self-destructive buildings save seem most concerned by the fact that they are all pushed aside and not accepted into close white schools. They wonder wherefore they are not exchangeabled or trusted. succeeding(prenominal) Kozol travels to Chicago, Illinois, in the area of Lawndale where Martin Luther King has worked and experienced the smite racism of his life. The conditions are similar as in East St. Louis with filth, decay and danger in in general non-white schools. Kozol focuses on the incompetent and unkind teachers are the wholly mint the Chicago school system have been chartered for these segregated schools and offering low wages. The author disagrees with giving medication offici als claims that schools assumet need more bills, entirely better teaching methods. To prove his straits he talks about a dedicated, glorious teacher working in the slums who manages to excite students. She is mediocre down the hall from uncaring teachers. If they wish to learn her methods, all they have to do is watch.Lack of money is the problem and racism is the reason these schools are not getting the money they need, Kozol states. Thousands more dollars are worn out(p) each year on each white student attending better schools in the nearby suburbs. Blaming teaching methods or parental involvement for the dread problems in segregated schools is easier than raising money and end solutions.The author continues on that the way schools are funded allows in tinctities to continue. Local prop taxationes fund schools, meaning the money a school receives is based on the value of the houses in the area. Houses in richer areas can be afforded by whites that pay more property taxe s and get better schools (even if they are dumping sewage onto non-white areas situated below them without make it taxes to those areas to patron clean up). Richer homeowners also get tax relief for paying their mortgages.Meanwhile, poor black areas are dumping grounds for toxic waste and garbage, which eudaemonia the wealthier citizens, alone they tend to be the only places poor non-whites can afford to live. Low properrty values result in badly funded, dangerous schools. Wealthier whites avoid these common schools and move to suburbs where their property taxes go toward building high-toned public schools. Trier school is an example. It attracts a extremely trained staff, and boasts an Olympic swimming pool as well as other luxuries. An article about this suburban school brags that most of the students in it are white.Kozol says that magnet schools (special public schools built for the most smart students) seem like a good idea, but are also unfair. The inner city separat e non-white students usually dont provide wellspring start programs or educated parents who can help them push for booktance. Students of magnet schools are mostly white. separate students watch television and know they are universe treated like something less(prenominal) than human. This is savagely cruel.In the next area, New York, Kozol sees the same pattern of filth, sluggishness and degradation. The difference between money spent in inner city schools and outlying suburbs is more than doubled in the New York districts. The school system administrators admit they dont even know how many kids become discouraged and drop out of these schools. Kozol finds this blow out of the water in a town where every penny stock on protect Street can be accounted for every day. However, the school system cannot roll a list of names of dropouts. In fact, several(prenominal) school administrators admit that they actually hope kids impart drop out because they have so many students, they cant teach them all.Health shell out for disadvantaged minorities is pathetic, which shows societys indifference to the non-whites, says Kozol. As in Illinois, living inequalities in New York are not just a local anaesthetic problem. The situate of New York actually distributes more money to the richer schools. visit a fancy school in Rye, NY, Kozol is bilk to learn privileged kids are uninterested to the wo(e) of non-white students in other schools. According to Kozol this is not sure of students in his day.Media adds to the misconceptions about poor schools, according to Kozol. For instance, The Wall Street Journal claims that minor cuts in class size wont help test scores such(prenominal). Kozol argues that if that is the case, wherefore not double the number of children in each white public school classroom? Nobody would stand for this.He visits Camden, NJ, the ordinal poorest area in country. At Pyne Jr. tall there are no computers. At the local high school the compu ters have literally liquefied because of the extreme heat in the non-air conditioned building. Kozol wonders why African American teachers at these schools ignore the issues of melt down as if they just accept matters as inevitable. uplifted school kids in Camden tell Kozol about beingness unable to read the classics because pages are missing from their books, and one promising student is told by her guidance councilor to give up her dream of becoming a lawyer because her English isnt good enough. As in other cities, dangerous chemicals flee from nearby factories (the factories do not pay taxes here) and children suffer major illnesses. The only principal who earns respect from the media s a man who walks around the school with a bat and tosses ternary hundred students out of school. This doesnt help the school, but it gets him on the cover of magazines.When parents of a young male child named, Raymond Abbott go to cost to protest the inferior raising he is receiving as a po or non-white son in New Jersey. Expensive lawyers are hired by the State to fight back the lawsuit. Eventually the court decides that Raymond is indeed being unfairly treated. However, the decision comes too late to save his educational career. Raymond ends up a dropout cocaine addict in jail.Before introducing readers to the problems in Washington, DC, Kozol observes that disadvantaged people ask for totally equal education when they go to court. Why not? Kozol heads to Washington, where the city contrasts with the reality of the non-white slums a few blocks away. A city official observes that the very poor accept a dual system with richer magnet schools so the whites wont leave altogether and take political power and money to the suburbs. The news media seem to reprove the victim portraying the people who live in ghettos as dangerous fools who send packing too much on expensive tennis shoes and jewelry. Kozol says TV viewers in the suburbs dont ensure this stuff is being pushe d on ghetto residents who have no access to things of real value.One failed method of astir(p) non-white schools has been to hire non-white administrators. Kozol says this cannot help. Detroit has had non-white administration for years and the underfunded schools are still in a predicament. When a U.S. District speak to finds that Detroit schools are both separate and unequal, the U.S. dictatorial judicatory is called in to consider the charge. The Supreme Court at this time is heavily packed with conservative Nixon appointees. These decide say that making things fair in the city of Detroit for the poor would unfairly punish the suburbs. An important legal expert of the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, disagrees with the majority opinion and sees that the country has taken a giant step backward in values. Later, President George H.W. Bush says money is not the set to solving school problems.Kozol then heads to San Antonio where he begins by claiming that Americans hesitate to directly discriminate against other peoples children because this would make them feel guilty. However, he thinks, laws have allowed discrimination to occur in a less direct form. For example, in the 1920s in America the Foundation program is established. It is supposed to mean that everybody is taxed on local homes and businesses at the same rate, and the federal government comes in to make up the difference in money raised by sending spare subsidies to poor schools. Yet, white schools historically get more of this make up money. Kozol thinks its strange that when it comes to equal funding for public schools, officials fight for local control, but the federal government is happy to overrule federal control when it comes to which books should be read, and other important issues.In 1968 in San Antonio, the parents of Demetrio Rodriguez and other students go to court to fight for equal funds for their low-grade school. Justice Powell of the Supreme Court suggests that a quality e ducation is not guaranteed by the constitution, although lawyers argue the students need the skills to vote, which is guaranteed by the constitution. jack oak years later it is found that unequal funding is in fact unfair, but of course this decision is too late for the kid who brought the lawsuit in the first place.Kozol visits Alamo Heights near San Antonio where the wealthy live. He then descends to the shacks below the bluffs where 99.3 percent of the kids are Latino and poor enough to rely on the school lunch program for their main meal of the day. follow by means of in the valley, the teachers are underpaid, the buildings are crumbling and the schools can spend only a fraction of what they spend in Alamo Heights on each student. Yet most of the States extra funding goes to Alamo Heights. eventually Kozol sees that when white children are impoverished and discriminated against, their schools are poor, too. He visits a community of poor Appalachian children fox into one sch ool. It undergoes overcrowding the building is in shambles and teachers lack resource, just like all of the non-white schools all over the country. He is told that soon many of these children will be bussed to non-white schools nearbyKozols observations are haunting. Time and time again the pattern is repeated Non-whites pushed into nasty, dangerous conditions through history, whites unwilling to share their prosperity with the people of glossiness they fear, governments endless excuses for doing nothing and actually blocking the victory of poor schools in corrupt ways. Kozols conclusion is that this is illogical, unpatriotic and deeply unkind.Overall, I truly enjoyed this book and what is has to offer when describing the unequal treatment African Americans and minorities have in urban areas. Heres what we should do. puzzle more money into preschool, kindergarten, elementary years. lucre college kids to indoctrinate inner city children. Get rid of the property tax, which is to o uneven and use income taxes to support these schools. Pay teachers more to work in more places like the Bronx. It has to come from taxes. Pay them extra to go to the flog schools. You could forgive their college loans to make it worth their while., this statement spoke to me. Its the ideal plan, however I dont see it actually transpiring into our education origination.I was ignorant to the true facts of the American educational system. This book, Mr. Kozol, has opened my eyes to the history, suffering and makes a virile impact on his behalf. He begins by covering specific, terrible injustices then examines how the troubles have come to be, sometimes by reviewing court decisions or by ghost the movement of labor away from a ill-tempered area. Next, he talks about those things standing in the way of improvement, often vague attitudes or fears. Finally, toward the end of the book, he begins to outline his vision for getting noncurrent the roadblocks and improving all schools. The result is that the reader/I was hooked right away, wondering how in the world such awful things have come to pass.