Read Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol Essay

In 1964, the actor, Jonathan Kozol, is a youngish patch who whole caboodle as a teacher. Like some(prenominal) anformer(a)(prenominal) others at the time, the grade coach where he teaches is segregated (teaching only non- sporting scholars), understaffed, and in short(p) physical condition. Kozol loses his premier job as a teacher because he introduces students to some Afri screw Ameri provide poetry that questions the conditions of blacks in America. Years later, after holding many other jobs, Kozol misses bl final stage ining with children. He decides to visit develops across America to squargon up what has changed. What he learns is saddening many sh solelyows cause student bodies that atomic number 18 still dissipate and unequalized.Kozols journey starts in due east St. Louis, Illinois. Traveling with a charwoman from a religious organization, Kozol takes a look around the intimate city. The t delivers passel sits on a flood plain below beautiful homes that h ave been built on. Furthermore, factories pour sewage and toxic waste into the city. Playgrounds atomic number 18 assemble to contain heavy metals that can make children ill. An attempt has been made at construction a new give lessons in one field of view, that cheap construction techniques result in a roof that collapses. topical anesthetic grade school children tell Kozol horror stories of family and friends who were murdered.A visit to the East St. Louis schools reveals an over each(prenominal) lack of facilities. Sewage floods lunchrooms, making it intolerable to serve intellectual nourishment there. Students need books, computers, chalk and nonetheless toilet paper. Science classes need mental test tubes, tables, running water and even heat. The ceiling is some to collapse in one school, the gym and locker room stink with toxic mold, and even the arts classes have no tools.Dedicated teachers make poverty wage teaching oversized classrooms and even choose to bring in their own teaching aids and pay for them stunned of their own wages. Almost all(prenominal) student in every run pile school is non white. minority students know they are receiving inferior preparation in ugly, filthy, dangerous buildings tho wait most concerned by the fact that they are all pushed aside and not live withed into tightlippedby white schools. They wonder why they are not the liked or trusted.Next Kozol travels to Chicago, Illinois, in the area of Lawndale where Martin Luther King has worked and experienced the worst racism of his life. The conditions are similar as in East St. Louis with filth, decay and danger in mostly non-white schools. Kozol focuses on the incompetent and unkind teachers are the only people the Chicago school system have been hired for these segregated schools and offering low wages. The author disagrees with government officials claims that schools dont need more money, only ruin teaching methods. To prove his point he talks or so a dedicated, brilliant teacher working in the slums who manages to excite students. She is just 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 spent each social class on each white student attending give schools in the close suburbs. Blaming teaching methods or parental involvement for the horrible problems in segregated schools is easier than raising money and finding solutions.The author continues on that the course schools are funded allows inequalities to continue. Local retention taxes 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 returned by whites that pay more property taxes and get better schools (even if they are dumping sewage onto non-white areas situated below them without paying taxes to those areas to alleviate 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 hit the wealthier citizens, but 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 subjugate these cosmos schools and move to suburbs where their property taxes go toward building elegant unexclusive schools. Trier school is an example. It attracts a highly trained staff, and boasts an Olympic melted pool as well as other luxuries. An article almost 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 talented students) seem like a nigh idea, but are also unfair. The inner city disadvantaged non-white students ordinarily dont provide head start schedules or ameliorate parents who can help them push for a dmittance. Students of magnet schools are mostly white. discriminate students watch television and know they are cosmos treated like something less than human. This is savagely cruel.In the next area, sore York, Kozol sees the same shape of filth, indifference and degradation. The difference between money spent in inner city schools and outlying suburbs is more than double in the immature York districts. The school system administrators admit they dont even know how many kids be summate discouraged and drop out of these schools. Kozol finds this shocking in a town where every penny stock on Wall bridle-path can be accounted for every day. However, the school system cannot collect a list of names of dropouts. In fact, several school administrators admit that they au thenticly hope kids will drop out because they have so many students, they cant teach them all.Health care for disadvantaged minorities is pathetic, which shows indian lodges indifference to the non-whites, says Kozol. As in Illinois, funding inequalities in New York are not just a topical anaesthetic problem. The State of New York rattling distributes more money to the richer schools. Visiting a fancy school in Rye, NY, Kozol is disappointed to learn privileged kids are uninterested to the pain of non-white students in other schools. According to Kozol this is not true 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 rafts much. Kozol advocates that if that is the case, why not double the number of children in each white public school classroom? Nobody would stand for this.He visits Camden, NJ, the quartern poorest area in expanse. At Pyne Jr. High there are no computers. At the topical anesthetic high school the computers have literally melted because of the extreme heat in the non-air conditioned building. Kozol wonders why African American teach ers at these schools ignore the issues of race as if they just accept matters as inevitable. High school kids in Camden tell Kozol about being 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 hurt major illnesses. The only principal who earns respect from the media s a man who walks around the school with a bat and tosses three hundred students out of school. This doesnt help the school, but it gets him on the cover of magazines.When parents of a young boy named, Raymond Abbott go to flirt to protest the inferior education he is receiving as a poor non-white boy in New Jersey. dear(predicate) lawyers are hired by the State to fight the lawsuit. Eventually the court decides that Raymond is indeed being un fairly treated. However, the decision comes too late to assuage his educational career. Raymond ends up a dropout cocaine addict in jail. sooner 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 emerge altogether and take political power and money to the suburbs. The news media seem to blame the victim portraying the people who live in ghettos as dangerous fools who spend too much on expensive tennis shoes and jewelry. Kozol says TV viewers in the suburbs dont infer this stuff is being pushed on ghetto residents who have no access to things of real value.One failed method of improving non-white schools has been to hire non-white administrators. Kozol say s 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 Court finds that Detroit schools are both separate and unequal, the U.S. peremptory Court is called in to consider the charge. The imperious Court at this time is heavily packed with conservative Nixon appointees. These adjudicate say that making things fair in the city of Detroit for the poor would unfairly punish the suburbs. An important Justice 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, chairman George H.W. Bush says money is not the answer 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 progress in a less d irect 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 unnecessary 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 keep back, 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 education is not guaranteed by the constitution, although lawyers argue the students need the skills to vote, which is guaranteed by the constitution. Twenty-one ye ars 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 high gear near San Antonio where the wealthy live. He then descends to the shacks below the bluffs where 99.3 percent of the kids are Hispanic and poor enough to rely on the school lunch program for their main meal of the day. Down 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 superfluous funding goes to Alamo Heights.Finally Kozol sees that when white children are impoverished and discriminated against, their schools are poor, too. He visits a community of poor Appalachian children thrust into one school. 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 repeat Non-whites pushed into nasty, dangerous conditions through history, whites unwilling to share their prosperity with the people of discolour they fear, governments endless excuses for doing nothing and actually blocking the success of poor schools in corrupt ways. Kozols conclusion is that this is illogical, unpatriotic and deeply unkind.Overall, I rightfully 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. Put more money into preschool, kindergarten, primary years. Pay college kids to tutor inner city children. Get rid of the property tax, which is too 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 worst schools. Y ou 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 world.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 powerful impact on his behalf. He begins by showing specific, terrible injustices then examines how the troubles have come to be, sometimes by reviewing court decisions or by tracing the impulsion of labor away from a particular 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 past 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.