Savage Inequalities

Jonathan Kozol

Since his first book in 1969, Death at an Early Age, Jonathan Kozol has been an eloquent and unrelenting advocate of equal educational opportunity for poor and disadvantaged students, particularly those in America's inner cities. In Savage Inequalities he again attempts to raise the nation's social and political consciousness, focusing on the unequal funding that, in his view, lies behind unequal opportunities. In the following passage he argues against the skeptics who claim that increased funding for impoverished inner-city schools would make little difference.

The point is often made that, even with a genuine equality of schooling for poor children, other forces still would militate against their school performance. Cultural and economic factors and the flight of middle-income blacks from inner cities still would have their consequences in the heightened concentration of the poorest children in the poorest neighborhoods. Teen-age pregnancy, drug use and other problems still would render many families in these neighborhoods all but dysfunctional. Nothing I have said within this book should leave the misimpression that I do not think these factors are enormously important. A polarization of this issue, whereby some insist upon the primacy of school, others upon the primacy of family and neighborhood, obscures the fact that both are elemental forces in the lives of children.

The family, however, differs from the school in the significant respect that government is not responsible, or at least not directly, for the inequalities of family background. It is responsible for inequalities in public education. The school is the creature of the state; the family is not. To the degree, moreover, that destructive family situations may be bettered by the future acts of government, no one expects that this could happen in the years immediately ahead. Schools, on the other hand, could make dramatic changes almost overnight if fiscal equity were a reality....

It is obvious that urban schools have other problems in addition to their insufficient funding. Administrative chaos is endemic in some urban systems. (The fact that this in itself is a reflection of our low regard for children who depend upon these systems is a separate matter.) Greater funding, if it were intelligently applied, could partially correct these problems—by making possible, for instance, the employment of some very gifted, high-paid fiscal managers who could assure that money is well used—but it probably is also true that major structural reforms would still be needed. To polarize these points, however, and to argue...that administrative changes are a "better" answer to the problem than equality of funding and real efforts at desegregation is dishonest and simplistic. The suburbs have better administrations (sometimes, but not always), and they also have a lot more money in proportion to their children's needs. To speak of the former and evade the latter is a formula that guarantees that nothing will be done today for children who have no responsibility for either problem.

To be in favor of "good families" or of "good administration" does not take much courage or originality. It is hard to think of anyone who is opposed to either. To be in favor of redistribution of resources and of racial integration would require a great deal of courage—and a soaring sense of vision—in a president or any other politician. Whether such courage or such vision will someday become transcendent forces in our nation is by no means clear.

Questions

1. How are the needs of poor and disadvantaged children, especially those in inner cities, different from those of children in suburban school districts?
2. Do you agree or disagree with Kozol that suburban districts have "a lot more money in proportion to their children's needs"? If so, how should government officials address this disparity?
3. What constituencies might argue against Kozol, and what would their reasoning be?

Source: Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, pp. 123–124. Copyright © 1991 by Jonathan Kozol. Reprinted by permission of Crown Publishers, Inc.