Jonathan Kozol

The first school he went to first he says is located inside an old skating rink! He tells us this to show us how the schools were not made properly in a appropriately designated area for students. The next public school he goes to he says that it was very crowded. He then discusses the insufficient money income of the two public schools he visited compared to another school he visited in River dale. River dale is a rich area with a bunch if expensive houses sou rounding it. Jonathan finds out that in the first two schools he visited, they get six thousand dollars per student, but in the third public school, located in River dale, gets eleven thousand dollars per student. This is because in New York the unfairly divided the amount of money provided to the schools depending on the value of houses in that area, so basically if there are wealthy houses then the school is wealthy but if not then the school is

     In Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol documents the devastating inequalities in American schools, focusing on public education’s “savage inequalities” between affluent districts and poor districts. From 1988 till 1990, Kozol visited schools in over thirty neighborhoods, including East St. Louis, the Bronx, Chicago, Harlem, Jersey City, and San Antonio. Kozol describes horrifying conditions in these schools. He spends a chapter on each area, and provides a description of the city and a historical basis for the impoverished state of its school. These schools, usually in high crime areas, lack the most basic needs. Kozol creates a scene of rooms without heat, few supplies or text, labs with no

Our culture in America puts a huge emphasis on the value of education. However, not all children in America receive the same benefits from school. Jonathan Kozol, author of The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, explores the feelings of those in lower-income districts and the inequality they feel. Kozol focuses on how younger children, elementary schoolers, look around and see richer schools while their own school is run-down and falling apart. People are very aware of the score gap between rich schools and poor schools. Despite our awareness, we miss the main point by trying to close the “word gap”. This gap will only grow larger as poor school districts are economically disenfranchised repeatedly,

One of the the main disadvantage schools in impoverished areas have is that their “school finance is based on local property taxes (Porter).” The environment around the schools includes people in extreme poverty. Just in Georgia,

Introduction: As a well accomplished writer, activist, and educator, Jonathan Kozol has devoted his life to the challenge of providing equal education to every child in our public schools.

He discusses the school system in Anacostia, which is a school district in D.C., and is very similar to the schools previously mentioned. The cafeteria is in a basement, which is often flooded and has rats. Many of the school children, as young as 8 years old, work for drug dealers from New York City. The young girls who go to school here usually end up pregnant and single because the young men either die early, get arrested, or join the military as a way out of the neighborhood. Kozol uses these poor neighborhoods to describe what he calls the “foundation program”. He simplifies it into three basic parts to describe how these schools end up getting money. First, local taxes are the basic funding for public schools. These are taxes placed on homes in the surrounding area of a school district. Second, the wealthy districts have minimal taxation but still have adequate school systems. Meanwhile, less affluent school districts have much higher taxes to make up for property values but still have inadequate school systems. Lastly, the state provides enough funds for poor districts to have the same standards as wealthier neighborhoods. However, the foundation program doesn’t always work because sometimes the lines get blurred on who gets what money and

Kozol is exploring the public education in New York. He begins at Public School 261 Philip Livingston, which is located in Brooklyn, New York. He is not in support of how the school is set up. He says the conditions in which the students are learning is not acceptable. Kozol then goes to Public School 79 where the classes are overcrowded and there are no windows. He decides to visit Public School 24, located in Riverdale where the properties value of the homes there are high. Kozol touches on how money is divided amongst the schools. There is a difference in how much money is being spent on a child’s education based on where they reside and go to school, which causes an inequality. For example, if the property value for a house around Public School 261 is worth little to none then the school only receives about roughly $4,000 per student, or even in some instances less. Compare

The prominent reason why expenditures per student and the allocation of revenue varies so greatly between these wealthier school districts and the more impoverished school districts in America, is the fact that their budgets are based on revenue generated by property taxes. The higher the taxes in a district, the greater the revenue and the resulting increase in financial capital that a school district has at its disposal. The result is much smaller class sizes, state of the art technology and facilities, better qualified teachers and faculty, and a significantly more amount of personal attention for the privileged students that attend these private schools.

However, there are too many discrepancies being ignored by the general public on the nature of local property taxes and their role in public education. Therefore, using local funds to support local schools of each designated district, allows for educational discrimination. Thus, it would seem utmost important to the future of public education, in relation to funding, to end local taxing that goes into the funding of school. Instead, public school funding should derive from the federal income tax funds, to ensure every student who attends public education institutions to receive the same amount of funds which are to be invested in their academic career. An idea also shared with Brian Wilson, author of the article,”Raising Taxes for Education Is Not the Answer,” as Wilson states; “ When money is short, leaders must raise taxes or create new ones to make up for what they perceive as lost revenue. However, government should always resist the creation of a new tax unless it replaces one that has been abolished”(Wilson,p.11). It simply would not seem fair to increase federal tax for all just to help fund public schooling, considering that is the general purpose for local property tax. That is why, it would seem most indispensable to remove local property taxes. The majority of these funds go to maintaining and or upgrading public facilities, as

Living in America, it is easily noticeable to tell the difference between a wealthy and poor community. Income inequity is in a variety of issues and topics between rich and poor. It is the extent to how income is distributed unevenly among the population that keeps on increasing the gap between the rich and poor. Income inequity creates a problem to where low-income high schools are not receiving the same benefits or resources as high-income high schools. The differences between these two, is from the location in which the schools are located. Income inequity brings a conflict and a solution to where low-income high schools can start moving forward to receiving the same benefits or resources as high income high schools, is to have the government provide more funding of resources to the low income schools, and to have donations from the well-off schools.

Within the next chapters, chapters 2 and 3, I began to really take into consideration Kozol’s way of writing and point of views. The voices were coming to life and it was nearly as if I was there in that classroom watching this degrading event occur. Chapter 2 began the illustration of how corrupt the education system really was in that particular day and age (some odd 40-50 years ago and continues today). Although all children should serve as equals, they were not and do not. It was merely a totem pole of color, whites being on top and colored falling below and usually falling behind. He compares the inner-city schools portraying the characteristics that a totalitarian government was then present and the funding for education was very scarce and limited regardless of the how well the economy was doing. The iteration of how poorly the children were focused on was also present and the point was once noted within the reading that the expressiveness of children was often muted (p. 71). Children weren’t allowed expression nor were they allowed activities outside of the lines. It was much like a

Public school systems, run democratically to provide every child the tools and opportunity to learn. Like everything that we have made, they are not perfect or infallible, but they symbolize an ideal; that by providing every child a suitable environment to grow, the child would become a driving force that may galvanize the world to change for the better. Democracy and justice are the system’s core values – not profit, expansion or market share. However, the segregation of the rich from the poor into privileged and impoverished neighborhoods, has caused school funding to be polarized. It is the main reason why some schools struggle, not all of them have the resources that could have been allocated to them. At the same time whenever we look at school spending, we look at an average, never considering that most of that money goes to the children of the wealthy and much less to poor kids. Adding to that we have not considered that more than half of our public school students live

An elementary student wrote to Kozol, “Dear Mr. Kozol, we do not have the things you have. You have clean things. We do not have. You have a clean bathroom. We do not have that. You have parks and we do not have parks. You have all the things and we do not have all the things. Can you help us?” (Kozol 351). This child lived in the Bronx and was in third grade. Kozol stated, New York’s Board of Education was only spending about $8,000 dollars yearly on education for the third grade. Had this student been white and living in a white suburb in New York, $12,000 dollars a year would be spent on education. If this student came from an even wealthier family in a white suburb in New York, $18,000 dollars yearly, would have been spent on education. Kozol provides this information to show what the Board of Education believes each child is worth.

Currently, wealthier neighborhoods spend more money on their schools. With a nationalized school system we can change the school tax system from property taxes to standard sales or general taxes and distribute the funds evenly. Such a drastic change may result in an outcry from parents in wealthier neighborhoods but this would only serve to heighten attention on the fact that schools need more funding to function properly and unequal distribution only reinforces the inequities (Miller).

Also fully aware of its privileged position in society. The educational inequality of the rich and the poor leads to the high social status of the family, and the students with wealthy economic background can choose "elite school", and families with low social status and poor economic conditions can only send their children to "lower working class school". This caused by the gap between rich and poor in the various economic strata. Many rich children can afford high accommodation and so on, and can enjoy superior educational service. But for more children of poor families, they do not have the same resources as them since lack of the funding. We all know that Public education in the United States is borne by the federal, state, and local governments. The state government 's spending on public education is the largest, and the poorer states get more state fundings. However, the local government has played a vital role in the gap between rich and poor. The more wealthy community, the more money that the school can get. Because the money is from the taxpayer, the rich people certainly reported a higher tax. In fact, the gap between the rich and the poor has created inequality in their children 's basic education. According to the chapter, “While the same arithmetic book was used in all five schools, the teacher in one working-class school commented that she skipped pages dealing with mathematical reasoning and inference because they were too hard. The teacher in