Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools by Jonathan Kozol.

4/5 rating. 233 pages.

Book #28 of 2022. Read June 15, 2022.

This is a scathing overview of how many children we are leaving behind in our public education system.

I was almost brought to tears multiple times while reading this book. The absolutely heartbreaking stories of poor and underserved children throughout the country is just so sad. Jonathan goes all over the US and looks at the differences between many urban and suburban schools. The suburban, mostly white schools, are usually great, beautiful institutions that set up students for success. Meanwhile, the urban schools are often falling apart, too small, understaffed, and serve a poor, mostly nonwhite populace. We set these poorer children up for failure, then blame them for not succeeding.

Some of the spending discrepancies were absolutely insane, as there were districts in Texas that were spending $2,112 per child, all the way up to $19,333. While opponents of more equity-based spending like to claim “money won’t fix the problems in the cities” they seem to think money will help their kids.

This was a truly depressing and sobering book to read, as I don’t think that we have improved the conditions much since it was written. But I think books like this are important to read because they are eye-opening to see how we leave so many of our fellow Americans behind. Unless people realize the extent of the problem and are faced with the ugly truth, it’s too easy to ignore it. And that can’t continue to happen if we want a more just country!

Quotes:

“What seems unmistakable, but, oddly enough, is rarely said in public settings nowadays, is that the nation, for all practice and intent, has turned its back upon the moral implications, if not yet the legal ramifications, of the Brown decision.”

“Looking around some of these inner-city schools, where filth and disrepair were worse than anything I’d seen in 1964, I often wondered why we would agree to let our children go to school in places where no politician, school board president, or business CEO would dream of working.”

“The decimation of the men within the population is quite nearly total. Four of five births in East St Louis are to single mothers. Where do the men go? Some to prison. Some to the military. Many to an early death.”

“So people who have nothing to start with waste their money on a place that sells them dreams. Lottery proceeds in Illinois allegedly go into education; in reality they go into state revenues and they add nothing to the education fund. So it is a total loss. Affluent people do not play the lottery. The state is in the business of selling hopes to people who have none.”

“‘The ultimate terror for white people,’ Ahmed says, ‘is to leave the highway by mistake and find themselves in East St. Louis. People speak of getting lost in East St. Louis as a nightmare. The nightmare to me is that they never leave that highway so they never know what life is like for all the children here. They ought to get off that highway. The nightmare isn’t in their heads. It’s a real place. There are children living here.”

“When people ask ‘What should we do with East St. Louis?’ they don’t speak about the people. They are speaking of the land.”

“I have seen children in New York with teeth that look like brownish, broken sticks. I have also seen teen-agers who were missing half their teeth. But, to me, most shocking is to see a child with an abscess that has been inflamed for weeks and that he has simply lived with and accepts as part of the routine of life. Many teachers in the urban schools have seen this. It is almost commonplace.”

“Night-time in this city, hot and smoky in the summer, there are dealers standin’ out on every street. Of the kids I see here, maybe 55 percent will graduate from school. Of that number, maybe one in four will go to college.”

“‘Is that a matter of race?’ I ask. ‘Or money?’ ‘Well,’ she says, choosing her words with care, ‘the two things, race and money, go so close together – what’s the difference? I live here, they live there, and they don’t want me in their school.’”

“‘Going to a school with all the races,’ Luther says, ‘is more important than a modern school.’ ‘They still believe in that dream,’ their teacher says. ‘They have no reason to do so. That is what I find so wonderful and…ah, so moving…’”

“Nine years from now, most of these children will go on to Manley High School, an enormous, ugly building just a block away that has a graduation rate of only 38 percent. Twelve years from now, by junior year of high school, if the neighborhood statistics hold true for these children, 14 of these 23 boys and girls will have dropped out of school. Fourteen years from now, four of these kids, at most, will go to college. Eighteen years from now, one of those four may graduate from college, but three of the 12 boys in this kindergarten will already have spent time in prison.”

“But if one knows the future that awaits them, it is terrible to see their eyes look up at you with friendliness and trust – to see this and to know what is in store for them.”

“Warmth and humor and contagious energy cannot be replicated and cannot be written into any standardized curriculum.”

“The system has the surface aspects of a meritocracy, but merit in this case is preferred by conditions that are closely tied to class and race. While some defend it as, in theory, ‘the survival of the fittest,’ it is more accurate to call it the survival of the children of the fittest – or of the most favored.”

“First we circumscribe their festivities and then we look at the diminished product and we say, ‘Let’s be pragmatic and do with them what we can.’”

“Equality of educational opportunity throughout the nation continues today for many to be more a myth than a reality.” – US Commissioner of Education, Francis Keppel

“This is not the way things should be.”

“Expectations are a powerful force….”

“According to a recent study issued by the State Commissioner of Education, ‘as many as three out of four blacks’ in New York City ‘and four out of five Latinos fail to complete high school within the traditional four-year period.’”

“But far more damaging, I am convinced, are the more subtle manacles of racial patterns in assignment and school tracking. Few things can injure a child more, or do more damage to the child’s self-esteem, than to be locked into a bottom-level track as early as the first or second grade. Add to this the squalor of the setting and the ever-present message of a child’s racial isolation, and we have in place an almost perfect instrument to guarantee that we will need more handcuffs and, no doubt, more prisons.”

“Affluent people, it has often been observed, seldom lack for arguments to deny to others the advantages that they enjoy.”

“I am asked to speak sometimes in towns like Princeton. I tell them, ‘If you don’t believe that money makes a difference, let your children go to school in Camden. Trade with our children – not beginning in the high school. Start when they’re little, in the first or second grade.’ When I say this, people will not meet my eyes. They stare down at the floor….”

“What is the message that it gives to children to grow up surrounded by trash burners, dumpsites and enormous prisons?”

“‘It rains on my city,’ said an eight-year-old I know, ‘but I see rainbows in the puddles.’ It moved me very much to hear that from a child. But you have to ask yourself: How long will this child look for rainbows?”

“It has recently become a matter of some interest to the press and to some academic experts to determine whether it is race or class that is the major factor in denial of these children. The question always strikes me as a scholar’s luxury. To kindergarten children in the schools of Paterson or Camden, it can hardly matter very much to know if the denial they experience is caused by their skin color or their destitution…”

“‘It took a judge seven years and 607 pages,’ notes the Philadelphia Inquirer, ‘to explain why children in New Jersey’s poor cities deserve the same basic education as kids in the state’s affluent suburbs.’”

“The reliance of our public schools on property taxes and the localization of the uses of those taxes ‘have combined to make the public school into an educator for the educated rich and a keeper for the uneducated poor. There exists no more powerful force for rigidity of social class and the frustration of natural potential….’”

“In economic terms, a lot of folks in Alamo Heights would think that Edgewood kids were educated fine if they had all the necessary skills to do their kitchen work and tend their lawns.”

“District spending [in Texas] ranged from $2,112 to $19,333. The richest district drew on property wealth of $14 million for each student while the poorest district drew on property worth only $20,000 for each student.”

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