A few months back I read very upseting essay in Harper’s Magazine by Jonotahn Kozol . I found it online here: Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid. The essay was published at around the same time his new book, The Shame of the Nation : The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America was released.
The book was also released around the same time that Hurrican Katrina hit New Orleans and showed the nation (and the world) the poverty that exists within the United States. Coincidentally, that is exactly what Kozol has dedicated his life to pointing out. The country was shamed when it was no longer hidden that poverty still exists in the United States, especially along racial lines. This sounds like a good time to make some changes.
His article highlights the problem that begets most other problems in society: lack of education. Here are a few quotes from Kozol’s article that I found particularly striking.
Perhaps most damaging to any serious effort to address racial segregation openly is the refusal of most of the major arbiters of culture in our northern cities to confront or even clearly name an obvious reality they would have castigated with a passionate determination in another section of the nation fifty years before—and which, moreover, they still castigate today in retrospective writings that assign it to a comfortably distant and allegedly concluded era of the past. There is, indeed, a seemingly agreed-upon convention in much of the media today not even to use an accurate descriptor like “racial segregation†in a narrative description of a segregated school. Linguistic sweeteners, semantic somersaults, and surrogate vocabularies are repeatedly employed. Schools in which as few as 3 or 4 percent of students may be white or Southeast Asian or of Middle Eastern origin, for instance—and where every other child in the building is black or Hispanic—are referred to as “diverse.†Visitors to schools like these discover quickly the eviscerated meaning of the word, which is no longer a proper adjective but a euphemism for a plainer word that has apparently become unspeakable.
In the years before I met Elizabeth, I had visited many other schools in the South Bronx and in one northern district of the Bronx as well. I had made repeated visits to a high school where a stream of water flowed down one of the main stairwells on a rainy afternoon and where green fungus molds were growing in the office where the students went for counseling. A large blue barrel was positioned to collect rain-water coming through the ceiling. In one makeshift elementary school housed in a former skating rink next to a funeral establishment in yet another nearly all-black-and-Hispanic section of the Bronx, class size rose to thirty-four and more; four kindergarten classes and a sixth-grade class were packed into a single room that had no windows. The air was stifling in many rooms, and the children had no place for recess because there was no outdoor playground and no indoor gym.
In another elementary school, which had been built to hold 1,000 children hut was packed to bursting with some 1,500, the principal poured out his feelings to me in a room in which a plastic garbage hag had been attached somehow to cover part of the collapsing ceiling. “This,†he told me, pointing to the garbage bag, then gesturing around him at the other indications of decay and disrepair one sees in ghetto schools much like it elsewhere, “would not happen to white children.†Libraries, once one of the glories of the New York City school system, were either nonexistent or, at best, vestigial in large numbers of the elementary schools. Art and music programs had also for the most part disappeared. “When I began to teach in 1969,†the principal of an elementary school in the South Bronx reported to me, “every school had a full-time licensed art and music teacher and librarian.†During the subsequent decades, he recalled, “I saw all of that destroyed.â€
School physicians also were removed from elementary schools during these years. In 1970, when substantial numbers of white children still attended New York City’s public schools, 400 doctors had been present to address the health needs of the children. By 1993 the number of doctors had been cut to 23, most of them part-time—a cutback that affected most severely children in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where medical facilities were most deficient and health problems faced by children most extreme. Teachers told me of asthmatic children who came into class with chronic wheezing and who at any moment of the day might undergo more serious attacks, but in the schools I visited there were no doctors to attend to them.
Around the time I met Alliyah in the school year 1997-1998, New York’s Board of Education spent about $8,000 yearly on the education of a third-grade child in a New York City public school. If you could have scooped Alliyah up out of the neighborhood where she was born and plunked her down in a fairly typical white suburb of New York,she would have received a public education worth about $12,000 a year. If you were to lift her up once more and set her down in one of the wealthiest white suburbs of New York, she would have received as much as $18,000 worth of public education every year and would likely have had a third-grade teacher paid approximately $30,000 more than her teacher in the Bronx was paid.
There are expensive children and there are cheap children,†writes Marina Warner, an essayist and novelist who has written many books for children, “just as there are expensive women and cheap women.†The governmentally administered diminishment in value of the children of the poor begins even before the age of five or six, when they begin their years of formal education in the public schools. It starts during their infant and toddler years, when hundreds of thousands of children of the very poor in much of the United States are locked out of the opportunity for preschool education for no reason but the accident of birth and budgetary choices of the government, while children of the privileged are often given veritable feasts of rich developmental early education.
Frequently these arguments are posed as questions that do not invite an answer because the answer seems to be decided in advance. “Can you really buy your way to better education for these children?†“Do we know enough to be quite sure that we will see an actual return on the investment that we make?†“Is it even clear that this is the right starting point to get to where we’d like to go? It doesn’t always seem to work, as I am sure that you already know,†or similar questions that somehow assume I will agree with those who ask them.
Some people who ask these questions, although they live in wealthy districts where the schools are funded at high levels, don’t even send their children to these public schools but choose instead to send them to expensive private day schools. At some of the well-known private prep schools in the New York City area, tuition and associated costs are typically more than $20,000 a year. During their children’s teenage years, they sometimes send them off to very fine New England schools like Andover or Exeter or Groton, where tuition, boarding, and additional expenses rise to more than $30,000. Often a family has two teenage children in these schools at the same time, so they may be spending more than $60,000 on their children’s education every year. Yet here I am one night, a guest within their home, and dinner has been served and we are having coffee now; and this entirely likable, and generally sensible, and beautifully refined and thoughtful person looks me in the eyes and asks me whether you can really buy your way to better education for the children of the poor.
There are a few parts in his essay about using military techniques to control students, which were absolutely appalling but I will not focus on that in this entry. All the quotes which I have chosen to highlight have one thing in common; they all show how poverty is the reason that education in the United States is not equal. Brown vs Board of Education established that separate is unequal along racial lines, but along the lines of class and wealth the notion of “separate but equal†still exists; We expect the same results from students who have horrible facilities to those who have modern and sofisticated facilities. Then we wonder why poors are more likely to fail school, like it’s an enigma.
The solution to this problem requires that people understand what equal education for everyone means. There is a great quote on that article that says:
A paradigm shift is required to facilitate the well-being of society in the USA. All must be free or none will be free.
The State of California demonostrates the unwillingness of people to make the shift towards equality for all. This is seen by the passing of Proposition 13 in 1978. Since property taxes are largely responsible for funding public schools, the state decided it rather suffocate itself than to make rich families pay more and support funding poor blacks and hispanic schools. Communities now raise money locally to ensure that their schools are properly funded, meanwhile ensuring that poor communities do not get any of their money.
We need a paradigm shift in education; we must all have opportunity to be educated equally or none have the right to be educated. People must realize that teachers are just as important as the lawyers and doctors (possibly even more important since they also teach our lawyers and doctors) and that paying teachers $40-50k a year does not attract the best of their fields. Currently, teachers must be martyrs (or masochists) who choose live in a low income bracket and work in horrible facilities in order to do something they believe in. This should not be so.
When a teaching position is as prestigious as a lawyer or doctor (an not a sacrifice), we see the best people in their fields attracted to teaching. Having better teachers produces better students who will in turn be better citizens: smart, creative, innovative, productive less violent. Pay is one way to add prestige.
It might seem absurd to propose paying teachers more will fix all our problems, but it’s a good start. It’s easy to say that the government does not have this kind of money to spend on teachers. I have a hunch that the United States government does have the money but it’s not being invested where we think it is. If the United States government is strapped for cash, then the distribution of money should be an indicator of where the government’s priorities are. If we look at the military spending we see that the United States government gives them the strongest priority.
The military gets more 8 times as much as education. I do not want to start a debate about the importance of the military now. I only want to show where our tax money is going. What does our tax money get us? Currently our tax money first gets us first bombers and missiles.
If you think all goverments are like this then you might be in for a surprise. Look at the military spending of rest of the world and compare. Currently, the US military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world’s combined. Education — the most important investment a generation can make for another — gets the same amount of funding per year as a program to build a couple of dozen fighters. This is the current state of the the United States. As the economy grows, so does the military. How about education? Does the military need to buy hundreds of new fighters every year? Which armys are we defending ourselves from?
Having a society that understands the importance of equality in education takes education. It’s circular logic but we have to start somewhere.