Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools by Jonathan Kozol

Author:Jonathan Kozol
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Philosophy & Social Aspects, Urban, Education, Sociology, Social Science
ISBN: 9780770436667
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2012-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

In his earnestness and in his willingness to search his conscience, David reminds me of some of the kids I knew during the civil rights campaigns of the mid-1960s. Standing here beside him and his teacher, it occurs to me that many students from this town, much like those in Riverdale, were active in those struggles. Hundreds of kids from neighborhoods like these exposed themselves to all the dangers and the violence that waited for young volunteers in rural areas of Mississippi.

Today, after a quarter of a century, black and white children go to the same schools in many parts of Mississippi—the public schools of Mississippi are, in fact, far more desegregated now than public schools in New York City—but the schools are very poor. In 1987, when a child in Great Neck or Manhasset was receiving education costing some $11,000, children in Neshoba County, Mississippi, scene of many of the bloodiest events during the voter registration drives of 23 years before, received some $1,500 for their education. In equally poor Greene County, Mississippi, things got so bad in the winter of 1988 that children enrolled at Sand Hill Elementary School had to bring toilet paper, as well as writing paper, from their homes because, according to the Jackson Daily News, “the school has no money for supplies.” In the same year, Time magazine described conditions in the Mississippi town of Tunica. The roof of a junior high school building in the district had “collapsed” some years before, the magazine reported, but the district had no money for repairs. School desks were “split” and textbooks were “rotting,” said Time. “Outside, there is no playground equipment.”

At Humphreys County High School, in the Mississippi Delta, the science lab has no equipment except a tattered periodic table. “The only air conditioning,” says a recent visitor, “is a hole in the roof.” In June and September, when the temperature outside can reach 100 degrees, the school is “double hot,” according to the principal. Children graduating from the school, he says, have little to look forward to except low-paid employment at a local catfish plant.

Until 1983, Mississippi was one of the few states with no kindergarten program and without compulsory attendance laws. Governor William Winter tried that year to get the legislature to approve a $60-million plan to upgrade public education. The plan included early childhood education, higher teacher salaries, a better math and science program for the high schools, and compulsory attendance with provisions for enforcement. The state’s powerful oil corporations, facing a modest increase in their taxes to support the plan, lobbied vigorously against it. The Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association began a television advertising campaign to defeat the bill, according to a Newsweek story.

“The vested interests are just too powerful,” a state legislator said. Those interests, according to Newsweek, are “unlikely” to rush to the aid of public schools that serve poor children.

It is unlikely that the parents or the kids in Rye or Riverdale know much about realities like these; and,

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