On Kozol

A few years ago, Jonathan Kozol and I were among a group of people giving presentations at an event in Chicago tied to the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. He spoke first and gave the kind of eloquent, morally severe speech one would expect, asserting that the nation's increasingly segregated schools were an insult to the memory of Brown. He also had unkind words for the contemporary school reform movement, citing in particular those who would point to "miracle schools," as he called schools with high poverty and high achievement, as evidence that education could serve as a counter-weight to larger problems of race and class. "We can't depend on miracles," he concluded. There was much applause.

I was working at the the Education Trust at the time, which specializes in identifying high-poverty, high-performing schools. So at the end of my presentation, which was about school funding disparities between rich and poor (they're particularly large in Illinois), I said, "Like most of the people in the audience, I've read and greatly benefitted from Jonathan Kozol's books. But I think he's wrong about the promise of high-performing schools. They're not miracle workers, they just do their jobs uncommonly well. Saying that their success is somehow supernatural denigrates their real accomplishments."

After the final speaker, an unreconstructed Marxist professor from DePaul who explained (really) that there could be no school reform until the revolution comes, we broke for lunch. I was making small talk with someone from the Chicago school district, when Kozol walked up and asked, without preamble, "Do you really think there all these schools out there that can overcome poverty?" Thus began a fascinating, hour-long conversation that continued as the room emptied out and the waiters cleared the dishes around us, before going outside where he could smoke. He was smart, wry, and more willing than he is in public to concede that some of public education's failures originate from sources other than societal racism, corporate-controlled goverment, and economic inequality. He was particularly interested in the school finance stuff, and we exchanged FAXs (he didn't do email) for a few months thereafter.

Kozol has been in the news a lot lately, first with his much-discussed diet to protest NCLB, and now with the publication of a new book, "Letters to a Young Teacher." The Weekly Standard has a review here, which contains most of the elements of the standard conservative anti-Kozol piece, which has become a genre unto itself: a lengthy section focusing on Kozol's admiration for Castro, standard pro-voucher and anti-school spending arguments, etc. There are also more than a few exaggerations and factual errors, which is problematic given that the author, Jonathan Leaf, accuses Kozol of the same sloppiness, as well as (citing no evidence) outright fabrication. Leaf says:

Kozol's impact has been enormous. The national phenomenon of judges' compelling states to change their tax codes to increase funding for schools in poor districts was driven by the widespread credence given to his 1991 book Savage Inequalities, which sold over 250,000 copies in hardcover alone.

That's nonsense. School funding lawsuits have been going on without interruption since the early 1970s, and the seminal Kentucky case that kicked off the "adequacy" movement in school finance, Rose v. Council for Better Education, was decided in 1989. Leaf also says:

As academics have known for many years, states that spend more on their schools often have the worst educational performance and some of the states that spend the least per pupil--like North Dakota and Utah--have among the best.

While North Dakota does pretty well, Utah ranks in the bottom half of states on the latest NAEP reading test. Hardly "some of the best."

Leaf does, however, hone in on what I think is the essential criticism of Kozol, which is that in his righteous anger and dark pessimism, he's become blind to all evidence of progress and possibility with our public schools. This point is made in Sandra Tsing Loh's much more worthwhile review in latest issue of The Atlantic, which isn't online yet, where she confesses to being:

"a longtime, rabid fan of Jonathan Kozol. Yea, I could show you my tower of dog-eared Kozolalia...I am the sort of impressionable woman whose eyes seep tears while reading his heartrending descriptions of racial inequality in public education...Pfizer should develop a special anti-depressant--"Zokol: for when you've read too much Kozol."

But she's also the mother of a white child who attends the predominantly minority, often low-income Los Angeles Unified Public Schools. She says:

I was pleasantly surprised (steeped in Kozolalia as I was) to discover that it was not a blasted wasteland...While aesthetically uninspiring on the outside, inside it was a plethora of books, computers, LeapFrog pads, and the like...I have yet, for instance, to trip over a crack-addicted parent in the parking lot...

Tsing Loh relates how she had her own Jonathan Kozol moment recently, and tried to talk to him about what these things might mean:

But he wasn't interested. What we need are moral leaders! he roared mightily. This is a civil rights issue! We need a religous leader, a prophet...thundering from the pulpit!

Kozol's critics often complain that he's been writing the same book, over and over, for forty years. I've never understood this--if the book needs to be written, if the message needs to be heard, then what else should he do? People need reminding of what's important--that's why church is every Sunday--and there's no surplus of well-known authors who can focus attention on the deep structural and social inequities that plague the education of the most vulnerable children.

But somewhere along the way, the burden and exhilaration of all those decades of righteousness seem to have narrowed Kozol's vision to point that he can longer see reasons to hope. True prophets provide more than just portents of doom; they stand up and show the faithful a path to a better place.