Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol Essay

Due to the forgoing facts brought to light by Kozol in his essay, it is apparent that there is a growing trend of racial segregation within America’s urban and inner-city schools. Educators and politicians seem to have abolished any semblance of respect for learning for its own sake and have made the school system a joyless experience for the majority of the children, which in turn seems to be related to the high drop-out rate in the inner-city schools. For America to remain great, just and competitive in today’s world, these educational anomalies must be timely addressed and corrected adequately.

It has become common today to dismiss the lack of education coming from our impoverished public schools. Jonathan Kozol an award winning social injustice writer, trying to bring to light how our school system talks to their students. In his essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal," Kozol visits many public high schools as well as public elementary schools across the country, realizing the outrageous truth about segregating in our public education system. Kozol, cross-examining children describing their feelings as being put away where no one desires your presence. Children feeling diminished for being a minority; attending a school that does not take into consideration at the least the child’s well being. Showing clear signs of segregation in the education system.

Children who grow up in a poor area go to school where there are 50 kids in one class and individual attention is never given, and children of high class families will go to schools that have smaller class sizes and individual attention. Even when a poor child goes to a better schoolteachers will question if the work done is their own and also only expect hard work from the rich kids. “if you are a child of low income parents, the chances are good that you will receive limited and often careless attention from adults in your high school.” Theodore Sizer “Horace’s Compromise,” “If you are the child of upper-middle income parents, the chances are good that you will receive substantial and careful attention.” (203) These quotes from another author showcase that school in America is often times based on the social standing of the parents.

America’s school system and student population remains segregated, by race and class. The inequalities that exist in schools today result from more than just poorly managed schools; they reflect the racial and socioeconomic inequities of society as a whole. Most of the problems of schools boil down to either racism in and outside the school or financial disparity between wealthy and poor school districts. Because schools receive funding through local property taxes, low-income communities start at an economic disadvantage. Less funding means fewer resources, lower quality instruction and curricula, and little to no community involvement. Even when low-income schools manage to find adequate funding, the money doesn’t solve all the school’s

     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

In Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol describes the conditions of several of America's public schools. Kozol visited schools in neighborhoods and found that there was a wide disparity in the conditions between the schools in the poorest inner-city communities and schools in the wealthier suburban communities. How can there be such huge differences within the public school system of a country, which claims to provide equal opportunity for all? It becomes obvious to Kozol that many poor children begin their young lives with an education that is far inferior to that of the children who grow up in wealthier communities. Savage Inequalities provides strong evidence of the national

In Jonathan Kozol’s essay, “Savage Inequalities” Kozol explains what he has learned from visiting three different district ten schools in New York. Kozol ultimately argues that students from low economic classes are being pushed aside and not given an equal education like the kids from high economic class schools. Looking at Kozol’s essay through a postcolonial scope the low class students can easily be seen as the subaltern and the high class students can be seen as the fortunate who benefit from the hegemonic power. Kozol describes the lower class school situation as if it weren't even school. Public School 261 is at a roller rink not even a formal built school. Some rhetoric devices that Kozol employs in his essay are artistic along with

Jonathon Kozol’s, “ The Shame of the Nation”, mainly covers the the discoveries of Jonathon Kozol of the discrimination and segregation that is still implemented today throughout schools in the United States, since the Supreme Court had tried to eradicate ruling of Brown v. Board of Education. Kozol travels a wide plethora of schools, where he records his findings, many troubling and of the apparent discrimination still experienced by minority school children in places like the Bronx. Essentially, this book was an eye opener to the average american. One would have never thought that the experiences Kozol was told by some of the children had talked about would ever have happened in an average public school.

In “Still Separate, Still Unequal”, Jonathan Kozol, a teacher, author, and educational activist and social reformer argued that “American schools today might be more segregated than at any time since 1954…[which] threatens an entire generation of Americans”(Rereading American book). “Still Separate, Still Unequal” was affected by the author’s life, works, and purpose in that his thoughts are biased based on his experiences as an inner-city elementary school teacher and work with poor children and their families and was persuasive for an audience of American citizens. The view Kozol had on this topic of the “resegregation” of schools in America is explained and written as a negative look on the American education system.

Education and economic justice were two forms of systemic inequalities that make inequality difficult to talk about. Education is a requirement if someone wishes to have a better life, but not everyone has access to quality education. In the U.S there has always been a battle, people of color have fought to be able to access quality education, (Philips, 2016: 130) they are constantly attending inferior and ineffective school where there are many distractions for students to be fully successful in the classrooms. Often these schools where children of color attend lack quality facilities, educational resources, and qualified teachers. Someone can’t help to notice that in general such unqualified schools are mostly in color people’s neighborhoods.

Jonathan Kozol, in the chapter entitled “Other People’s Children, discusses and justifies the kinds of limitations placed on children who must attend poorly funded, educationally inferior school. Kozol argues that children in the inner-city schools are not fit to go to college and that they should be trained in schools for the jobs they will eventually hold, even though these jobs are less prestigious, lowest-level jobs in society. Kozol’s argument is based on the fact that students from the inner-city or rather from the societies that do not have enough job opportunities are not supposed to learn much because their society cannot accommodate most of the courses that are often found in the urban settings. For example, there is a point where Kozol cites one of the businessman’s statement which says, ‘It doesn’t make sense to offer something that most of these urban kids will never use.’ The businessman continues to argue, ‘no one expects these ghetto kids to go to college. Most of them are lucky if they are literate. If we can teach some useful skills, get them to stay in school and graduate, and maybe into jobs, we’re giving them the most that they can hope for’ (Kozol 376). This statement clearly indicate that the society should accept the inequalities and exercise the same inequalities even in education.

The educational system of the united states is not capitalizing on the full potential of its people. Jonathan Kozol in his article “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid”, discusses the drastic difference in the quality of education based on a family’s income. Kozol discusses how economic disparities usually coincide with race, but focuses on the economic gap of education. Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast “Carlos doesn’t remember”, gives a story and a personal touch, to the issues low income students face. Kozol writing and Gladwell’s podcast, both show that the quality of a child’s education is pure chance. A lottery of being born into a high or low income family dictates the outcome and capitalization of a child’s future.

Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol explains the inequalities of school systems in different poor neighborhoods. Kozol was originally a teacher in a public school in Boston. This school didn’t have very many resources and was unable to keep teachers for very long. After pursuing other interests, Kozol took the time from 1988-1990 to meet with children and teachers in several different neighborhoods to better understand issues relating to the inequality and segregation in the school systems. Kozol writes from his own perspective as he visits six different cities and the poorest schools in those cities. These cities consist of East St. Louis in Illinois, the South Side of Chicago in Illinois, New York City, Camden in New Jersey, Washington

This shift is the result of several different factors like bigger increases in enrollment by black, Latino and Asian students, white flight, and the failure of the housing system that continues to isolate racial and ethnic groups. The biggest changes have come from lower courts that have lifted desegregation orders in around three-dozen schools districts since the 1990’s. School districts in places like Little Rock, San Diego, Denver and Miami have all come out from under court supervision. Lifting the desegregation orders is seen as ok because school districts can be considered successfully desegregated even if there is a racial imbalance in the school because that is probably from demographic factors. As a result of this black and Latino students now typically go to schools where only a small part of their class is white. This study also found that on average, white students make up about 61 percent of the nation’s public school population and they go to schools where 80 percent of their classmates are

Education is a United States given right and is meant to set every individual who goes through the school system at an equal starting point. The education system’s initial purpose was for it not to matter what a student’s economical, race, or family history was, but rather to allow any student to get a valuable education. Unfortunately, this starting goal is not how the school systems are ran today, rather, a school’s funding is dependant on the surrounding neighborhood. This inequality of neighborhoods and therefore, school funding, is especially prominent in Memphis, TN.