What was jonathan kozol’s impression of the poorly funded schools he visited in urban chicago?

PRAISE FOR

Savage Inequalities

“Easily the most passionate, and certain to be the most passionately debated, book about American education in several years … A classic American muckraker with an eloquent prose style, Kozol offers … an old- fashioned brand of moral outrage that will affect every reader whose heart has not yet turned to stone.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Moving … Shocking … Heartbreaking.” —Ruth Sidel, The Nation

“It is neither ironic nor paradoxical to call Savage Inequalities a wonderful book—for Kozol makes it clear that there are wonderful teachers and wonderful students in every American school, no matter what ugliness, violence, and horror surround the building.”

—Chicago Tribune

“The great virtue of Jonathan Kozol’s new book about inner-city schools is that it overcomes that ‘everybody knows’ problem by bringing an undulled capacity for shock and outrage to a tour of bad schools across the country. As soon as Kozol begins leading the way through a procession of overcrowded, underheated, textbookless, barely taught classrooms, the thought he surely intended to engender begins to take form: How can this be?”

—Washington Post Book World

“Poor children of all colors are increasingly looked upon as surplus baggage, mistakes that should never have happened. Indeed, an older view is returning that any attempts to educate the lower orders are doomed to fail. There can be more than one way to read the title of Jonathan Kozol’s depressing—and essential—book.”

2

—Andrew Hacker, New York Times Book Review

“Mr. Kozol exposes lemons in American educational facilities in the same way Ralph Nader attacked Detroit automobile makers.”

—Herbert Mitgang, New York Times

“This book digs so deeply into the tragedy of the American system of public education that it wrenches the reader’s psyche.… A must-read for every parent, every educator, and every relevant policymaker.”

—Alex Haley, author of Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“A powerful appeal to save children by redistributing the wealth. It will cause angry, but perhaps fruitful, debate.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Startling and compelling … Crucial to any serious debate on the current state of American education.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A superb, heart-wrenching portrait of the resolute injustice which decimates so many of America’s urban schools.”

—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Bearing the Cross

3

Also by Jonathan Kozol

FIRE IN THE ASHES

LETTERS TO A YOUNG TEACHER

THE SHAME OF THE NATION

ORDINARY RESURRECTIONS

AMAZING GRACE

RACHEL AND HER CHILDREN

ILLITERATE AMERICA

ON BEING A TEACHER

CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION

THE NIGHT IS DARK AND I AM FAR FROM HOME

FREE SCHOOLS

DEATH AT AN EARLY AGE

4

5

Copyright © 1991 by Jonathan Kozol

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Broadway Paperbacks, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

Broadway Paperbacks and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Crown Publishers, Inc., a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1991.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

eISBN: 978-0-7704-3666-7

Cover design by Darren Haggar Cover photograph: © Bettmann/CORBIS

v3.1

6

http://www.crownpublishing.com

For Cassie And for D.K. with love

7

CONTENTS

Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication

To the Reader Looking Backward: 1964–1991

1. Life on the Mississippi 2. Other People’s Children 3. The Savage Inequalities of Public Education in New York 4. Children of the City Invincible 5. The Equality of Innocence 6. The Dream Deferred, Again, in San Antonio

Appendix Notes Acknowledgments

8

kindle:embed:0008?mime=image/jpg

TO THE READER

A Clarification About Dates and Data in This Book

The events in this book take place for the most part between 1988 and 1990, although a few events somewhat precede this period. Most events, however, are narrated in the present tense. This is important to keep in mind because statistics, such as money spent in a particular school district, or a description of the staff or student body in a given school, apply to the year of which I’m speaking, which is indicated in the text or notes.

The names of students in this book have sometimes been disguised at their request or that of school officials. The names of all adults are real, although in a few cases adults are not named at all at their request. Documentation for statistics and matters of record in this book is provided in the notes beginning on this page.

9

Looking Backward: 1964–1991

It was a long time since I’d been with children in the public schools. I had begun to teach in 1964 in Boston in a segregated school so

crowded and so poor that it could not provide my fourth grade children with a classroom. We shared an auditorium with another fourth grade and the choir and a group that was rehearsing, starting in October, for a Christmas play that, somehow, never was produced. In the spring I was shifted to another fourth grade that had had a string of substitutes all year. The 35 children in the class hadn’t had a permanent teacher since they entered kindergarten. That year, I was their thirteenth teacher.

The results were seen in the first tests I gave. In April, most were reading at the second grade level. Their math ability was at the first grade level.

In an effort to resuscitate their interest, I began to read them poetry I liked. They were drawn especially to poems of Robert Frost and Langston Hughes. One of the most embittered children in the class began to cry when she first heard the words of Langston Hughes.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

She went home and memorized the lines. The next day, I was fired. There was, it turned out, a list of “fourth

grade poems” that teachers were obliged to follow but which, like most first-year teachers, I had never seen. According to school officials, Robert Frost and Langston Hughes were “too advanced” for children of this age. Hughes, moreover, was regarded as “inflammatory.”

I was soon recruited to teach in a suburban system west of Boston. The shock of going from one of the poorest schools to one of the wealthiest cannot be overstated. I now had 21 children in a cheerful building with a principal who welcomed innovation.

After teaching for several years, I became involved with other interests —the health and education of farm-workers in New Mexico and Arizona,

10

the problems of adult illiterates in several states, the lives of homeless families in New York. It wasn’t until 1988, when I returned to Massachusetts after a long stay in New York City, that I realized how far I’d been drawn away from my original concerns. I found that I missed being with schoolchildren, and I felt a longing to spend time in public schools again. So, in the fall of 1988, I set off on another journey.

During the next two years I visited schools and spoke with children in approximately 30 neighborhoods from Illinois to Washington, D.C., and from New York to San Antonio. Wherever possible, I also met with children in their homes. There was no special logic in the choice of cities that I visited. I went where I was welcomed or knew teachers or school principals or ministers of churches.

What startled me most—although it puzzles me that I was not prepared for this—was the remarkable degree of racial segregation that persisted almost everywhere. Like most Americans, I knew that segregation was still common in the public schools, but I did not know how much it had intensified. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education 37 years ago, in which the court had found that segregated education was unconstitutional because it was “inherently unequal,” did not seem to have changed very much for children in the schools I saw, not, at least, outside of the Deep South. Most of the urban schools I visited were 95 to 99 percent nonwhite. In no school that I saw anywhere in the United States were nonwhite children in large numbers truly intermingled with white children.

Moreover, in most cities, influential people that I met showed little inclination to address this matter and were sometimes even puzzled when I brought it up. Many people seemed to view the segregation issue as “a past injustice” that had been sufficiently addressed. Others took it as an unresolved injustice that no longer held sufficient national attention to be worth contesting. In all cases, I was given the distinct impression that my inquiries about this matter were not welcome.

None of the national reports I saw made even passing references to inequality or segregation. Low reading scores, high dropout rates, poor motivation—symptomatic matters—seemed to dominate discussion. In three cities—Baltimore, Milwaukee and Detroit—separate schools or separate classes for black males had been proposed. Other cities— Washington, D.C., New York and Philadelphia among them—were considering the same approach. Black parents or black school officials sometimes seemed to favor this idea. Booker T. Washington was cited with increasing frequency, Du Bois never, and Martin Luther King only

11

with cautious selectivity. He was treated as an icon, but his vision of a nation in which black and white kids went to school together seemed to be effaced almost entirely. Dutiful references to “The Dream” were often seen in school brochures and on wall posters during February, when “Black History” was celebrated in the public schools, but the content of the dream was treated as a closed box that could not be opened without ruining the celebration.

For anyone who came of age during the years from 1954 to 1968, these revelations could not fail to be disheartening. 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. The struggle being waged today, where there is any struggle being waged at all, is closer to the one that was addressed in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court accepted segregated institutions for black people, stipulating only that they must be equal to those open to white people. The dual society, at least in public education, seems in general to be unquestioned.

To the extent that school reforms such as “restructuring” are advocated for the inner cities, few of these reforms have reached the schools that I have seen. In each of the larger cities there is usually one school or one subdistrict which is highly publicized as an example of “restructured” education; but the changes rarely reach beyond this one example. Even in those schools where some “restructuring” has taken place, the fact of racial segregation has been, and continues to be, largely uncontested. In many cities, what is termed “restructuring” struck me as very little more than moving around the same old furniture within the house of poverty. The perceived objective was a more “efficient” ghetto school or one with greater “input” from the ghetto parents or more “choices” for the ghetto children. The fact of ghetto education as a permanent American reality appeared to be accepted.

Liberal critics of the Reagan era sometimes note that social policy in the United States, to the extent that it concerns black children and poor children, has been turned back several decades. But this assertion, which is accurate as a description of some setbacks in the areas of housing, health and welfare, is not adequate to speak about the present-day reality in public education. In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.

These, then, are a few of the impressions that remained with me after revisiting the public schools from which I had been absent for a quarter-

12

century. My deepest impression, however, was less theoretical and more immediate. It was simply the impression that these urban schools were, by and large, extraordinarily unhappy places. With few exceptions, they reminded me of “garrisons” or “outposts” in a foreign nation. Housing projects, bleak and tall, surrounded by perimeter walls lined with barbed wire, often stood adjacent to the schools I visited. The schools were surrounded frequently by signs that indicated DRUG-FREE ZONE. Their doors were guarded. Police sometimes patrolled the halls. The windows of the schools were often covered with steel grates. Taxi drivers flatly refused to take me to some of these schools and would deposit me a dozen blocks away, in border areas beyond which they refused to go. I’d walk the last half-mile on my own. Once, in the Bronx, a woman stopped her car, told me I should not be walking there, insisted I get in, and drove me to the school. I was dismayed to walk or ride for blocks and blocks through neighborhoods where every face was black, where there were simply no white people anywhere.

In Boston, the press referred to areas like these as “death zones”—a specific reference to the rate of infant death in ghetto neighborhoods— but the feeling of the “death zone” often seemed to permeate the schools themselves. 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. Children seemed to wrestle with these kinds of questions too. Some of their observations were, indeed, so trenchant that a teacher sometimes would step back and raise her eyebrows and then nod to me across the children’s heads, as if to say, “Well, there it is! They know what’s going on around them, don’t they?”

It occurred to me that we had not been listening much to children in these recent years of “summit conferences” on education, of severe reports and ominous prescriptions. The voices of children, frankly, had been missing from the whole discussion.

This seems especially unfortunate because the children often are more interesting and perceptive than the grownups are about the day-to-day realities of life in school. For this reason, I decided, early in my journey, to attempt to listen very carefully to children and, whenever possible, to let their voices and their judgments and their longings find a place within this book—and maybe, too, within the nation’s dialogue about their destinies. I hope that, in this effort, I have done them justice.

13

CHAPTER 1

Life on the Mississippi: East St. Louis, Illinois

“East of anywhere,” writes a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “often evokes the other side of the tracks. But, for a first-time visitor suddenly deposited on its eerily empty streets, East St. Louis might suggest another world.” The city, which is 98 percent black, has no obstetric services, no regular trash collection, and few jobs. Nearly a third of its families live on less than $7,500 a year; 75 percent of its population lives on welfare of some form. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development describes it as “the most distressed small city in America.”

Only three of the 13 buildings on Missouri Avenue, one of the city’s major thoroughfares, are occupied. A 13-story office building, tallest in the city, has been boarded up. Outside, on the sidewalk, a pile of garbage fills a ten-foot crater.

The city, which by night and day is clouded by the fumes that pour from vents and smokestacks at the Pfizer and Monsanto chemical plants, has one of the highest rates of child asthma in America.

It is, according to a teacher at the University of Southern Illinois, “a repository for a nonwhite population that is now regarded as expendable.” The Post-Dispatch describes it as “America’s Soweto.”

Fiscal shortages have forced the layoff of 1,170 of the city’s 1,400 employees in the past 12 years. The city, which is often unable to buy heating fuel or toilet paper for the city hall, recently announced that it might have to cashier all but 10 percent of the remaining work force of 230. In 1989 the mayor announced that he might need to sell the city hall and all six fire stations to raise needed cash. Last year the plan had to be scrapped after the city lost its city hall in a court judgment to a creditor. East St. Louis is mortgaged into the next century but has the highest property-tax rate in the state.

14

Since October 1987, when the city’s garbage pickups ceased, the backyards of residents have been employed as dump sites. In the spring of 1988 a policeman tells a visitor that 40 plastic bags of trash are waiting for removal from the backyard of his mother’s house. Public health officials are concerned the garbage will attract a plague of flies and rodents in the summer. The policeman speaks of “rats as big as puppies” in his mother’s yard. They are known to the residents, he says, as “bull rats.” Many people have no cars or funds to cart the trash and simply burn it in their yards. The odor of smoke from burning garbage, says the Post-Dispatch, “has become one of the scents of spring” in East St. Louis.

Railroad tracks still used to transport hazardous chemicals run through the city. “Always present,” says the Post-Dispatch, “is the threat of chemical spills.… The wail of sirens warning residents to evacuate after a spill is common.” The most recent spill, the paper says, “was at the Monsanto Company plant.… Nearly 300 gallons of phosphorous trichloride spilled when a railroad tank was overfilled. About 450 residents were taken to St. Mary’s Hospital.… The frequency of the emergencies has caused Monsanto to have a ‘standing account’ at St. Mary’s.”

In March of 1989, a task force appointed by Governor James Thompson noted that the city was in debt by more than $40 million, and proposed emergency state loans to pay for garbage collection and to keep police and fire departments in continued operation. The governor, however, blamed the mayor and his administrators, almost all of whom were black, and refused to grant the loans unless the mayor resigned. Thompson’s response, said a Republican state legislator, “made my heart feel good.… It’s unfortunate, but the essence of the problem in East St. Louis is the people” who are running things.

Residents of Illinois do not need to breathe the garbage smoke and chemicals of East St. Louis. With the interstate highways, says a supervisor of the Illinois Power Company, “you can ride around the place and just keep going.…”

East St. Louis lies in the heart of the American Bottoms—the floodplain on the east side of the Mississippi River opposite St. Louis. To the east of the city lie the Illinois Bluffs, which surround the floodplain in a semicircle. Towns on the Bluffs are predominantly white and do not welcome visitors from East St. Louis.

“The two tiers—Bluffs and Bottoms—” writes James Nowlan, a

15

professor of public policy at Knox College, “have long represented … different worlds.” Their physical separation, he believes, “helps rationalize the psychological and cultural distance that those on the Bluffs have clearly tried to maintain.” People on the Bluffs, says Nowlan, “overwhelmingly want this separation to continue.”

Towns on the Bluffs, according to Nowlan, do not pay taxes to address flood problems in the Bottoms, “even though these problems are generated in large part by the water that drains from the Bluffs.” East St. Louis lacks the funds to cope with flooding problems on its own, or to reconstruct its sewer system, which, according to local experts, is “irreparable.” The problem is all the worse because the chemical plants in East St. Louis and adjacent towns have for decades been releasing toxins into the sewer system.

The pattern of concentrating black communities in easily flooded lowland areas is not unusual in the United States. Farther down the river, for example, in the Delta town of Tunica, Mississippi, people in the black community of Sugar Ditch live in shacks by open sewers that are commonly believed to be responsible for the high incidence of liver tumors and abscesses found in children there. Metaphors of caste like these are everywhere in the United States. Sadly, although dirt and water flow downhill, money and services do not.

The dangers of exposure to raw sewage, which backs up repeatedly into the homes of residents in East St. Louis, were first noticed, in the spring of 1989, at a public housing project, Villa Griffin. Raw sewage, says the Post-Dispatch, overflowed into a playground just behind the housing project, which is home to 187 children, “forming an oozing lake of … tainted water.” Two schoolgirls, we are told, “experienced hair loss since raw sewage flowed into their homes.”

While local physicians are not certain whether loss of hair is caused by the raw sewage, they have issued warnings that exposure to raw sewage can provoke a cholera or hepatitis outbreak. A St. Louis health official voices her dismay that children live with waste in their backyards. “The development of working sewage systems made cities livable a hundred years ago,” she notes. “Sewage systems separate us from the Third World.”

“It’s a terrible way to live,” says a mother at the Villa Griffin homes, as she bails raw sewage from her sink. Health officials warn again of cholera —and, this time, of typhoid also.

The sewage, which is flowing from collapsed pipes and dysfunctional pumping stations, has also flooded basements all over the city. The city’s

16

vacuum truck, which uses water and suction to unclog the city’s sewers, cannot be used because it needs $5,000 in repairs. Even when it works, it sometimes can’t be used because there isn’t money to hire drivers. A single engineer now does the work that 14 others did before they were laid off. By April the pool of overflow behind the Villa Griffin project has expanded into a lagoon of sewage. Two million gallons of raw sewage lie outside the children’s homes.

In May, another health emergency develops. Soil samples tested at residential sites in East St. Louis turn up disturbing quantities of arsenic, mercury and lead—as well as steroids dumped in previous years by stockyards in the area. Lead levels found in the soil around one family’s home, according to lead-poison experts, measure “an astronomical 10,000 parts per million.” Five of the children in the building have been poisoned. Although children rarely die of poisoning by lead, health experts note, its effects tend to be subtle and insidious. By the time the poisoning becomes apparent in a child’s sleep disorders, stomach pains and hyperactive behavior, says a health official, “it is too late to undo the permanent brain damage.” The poison, she says, “is chipping away at the learning potential of kids whose potential has already been chipped away by their environment.”

The budget of the city’s department of lead-poison control, however, has been slashed, and one person now does the work once done by six.

Lead poisoning in most cities comes from lead-based paint in housing, which has been illegal in most states for decades but which poisons children still because most cities, Boston and New York among them, rarely penalize offending landlords. In East St. Louis, however, there is a second source of lead. Health inspectors think it is another residue of manufacturing—including smelting—in the factories and mills whose plants surround the city. “Some of the factories are gone,” a parent organizer says, “but they have left their poison in the soil where our children play.” In one apartment complex where particularly high quantities of lead have been detected in the soil, 32 children with high levels in their blood have been identified.

“I anticipate finding the whole city contaminated,” says a health examiner.

The Daughters of Charity, whose works of mercy are well known in the Third World, operate a mission at the Villa Griffin homes. On an afternoon in early spring of 1990, Sister Julia Huiskamp meets me on King Boulevard and drives me to the Griffin homes.

17

As we ride past blocks and blocks of skeletal structures, some of which are still inhabited, she slows the car repeatedly at railroad crossings. A seemingly endless railroad train rolls past us to the right. On the left: a blackened lot where garbage has been burning. Next to the burning garbage is a row of 12 white cabins, charred by fire. Next: a lot that holds a heap of auto tires and a mountain of tin cans. More burnt houses. More trash fires. The train moves almost imperceptibly across the flatness of the land.

Fifty years old, and wearing a blue suit, white blouse, and blue head- cover, Sister Julia points to the nicest house in sight. The sign on the front reads MOTEL. “It’s a whorehouse,” Sister Julia says.

When she slows the car beside a group of teen-age boys, one of them steps out toward the car, then backs away as she is recognized.

The 99 units of the Villa Griffin homes—two-story structures, brick on the first floor, yellow wood above—form one border of a recessed park and playground that were filled with fecal matter last year when the sewage mains exploded. The sewage is gone now and the grass is very green and looks inviting. When nine-year-old Serena and her seven-year- old brother take me for a walk, however, I discover that our shoes sink into what is still a sewage marsh. An inch-deep residue of fouled water still remains.

Serena’s brother is a handsome, joyous little boy, but troublingly thin. Three other children join us as we walk along the marsh: Smokey, who is nine years old but cannot yet tell time; Mickey, who is seven; and a tiny child with a ponytail and big brown eyes who talks a constant stream of words that I can’t always understand.

“Hush, Little Sister,” says Serena. I ask for her name, but “Little Sister” is the only name the children seem to know.

“There go my cousins,” Smokey says, pointing to two teen-age girls above us on the hill.

The day is warm, although we’re only in the second week of March; several dogs and cats are playing by the edges of the marsh. “It’s a lot of squirrels here,” says Smokey. “There go one!”

“This here squirrel is a friend of mine,” says Little Sister. None of the children can tell me the approximate time that school

begins. One says five o’clock. One says six. Another says that school begins at noon.

When I ask what song they sing after the flag pledge, one says “Jingle Bells.”

Smokey cannot decide if he is in the second or third grade.

18

Seven-year-old Mickey sucks his thumb during the walk. The children regale me with a chilling story as we stand beside the

marsh. Smokey says his sister was raped and murdered and then dumped behind his school. Other children add more details: Smokey’s sister was 11 years old. She was beaten with a brick until she died. The murder was committed by a man who knew her mother.

The narrative begins when, without warning, Smokey says, “My sister has got killed.”

“She was my best friend,” Serena says. “They had beat her in the head and raped her,” Smokey says. “She was hollering out loud,” says Little Sister. I ask them when it happened. Smokey says, “Last year.” Serena then