Words matter. These are the best Jonathan Kozol Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
President Obama’s first term in office has been better for intentions than for actual changes in planning and policy. I do believe, and he has several things to this effect, that he would like to provide universal preschool or at least far more preschool for our children.
No matter what happens in a child’s home, no matter what other social and economic factors may impede a child, there’s no question in my mind that a first-rate school can transform almost everything.
Our nation’s oldest sin and deepest crime is the isolation of minority children – black children, in particular – in schools that are not only segregated but shamefully unequal.
We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals. No, I refuse to pretend the problem is insufficient knowledge. We lack the theological will to do it.
In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.
My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle.
People rarely speak of children; you hear of ‘cohort groups’ and ‘standard variations,’ but you don’t hear much of boys who miss their cats or 6-year-olds who have to struggle with potato balls.
I feel, in the end, as if everything I’ve done has been a failure.
I don’t know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.
The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.
I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there’s no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.
The trouble is not that schools don’t work; they do. They’re excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain – and who then use the servants produced by ghetto schools.
Childhood ought to have at least a few entitlements that aren’t entangled with utilitarian considerations. One of them should be the right to a degree of unencumbered satisfaction in the sheer delight and goodness of existence in itself.
Hypersegregated inner-city schools – in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 – are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.
At present, black children are more segregated in their public schools than at any time since 1968. In the inner-city schools I visit, minority children typically represent 95 percent to 99 percent of class enrollment.
Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.
What I tell these young people is, the world is not as dangerous as the older generation would like you to believe. Anyone I know who has ever taken a risk and lost a job has ended up getting a better one two years later.
During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed.
If we allow public funds to be used to support our relatively benign, morally grounded schools, we will have to allow those public funds to be used for any type of private school.
The ‘niche’ effect of charter schools guarantees a swift and vicious deepening of class and racial separation.
Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There’s a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession – and I don’t find that to be true at all.
Congress has an opportunity to take advantage of the opening created by Justice Kennedy later this year when it reauthorizes the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima; 60 percent were either ten years old or older.
Our political establishment refuses to use the word ‘segregated.’ They call the schools diverse, which means half black, half Hispanic, and maybe two white kids and three Asians. ‘Diverse’ has become a synonym for ‘segregated.’
You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
Governor Romney has said nothing about preschool. I think that giving the poorest kids in America wonderful preschool, and three years of it, starting when they are two-and-a-half, is absolutely crucial.
Schooling should not be left to the whim or wealth of village elders. I believe that we should fund all schools in the U.S. with our national resources. All these kids are being educated to be Americans, not citizens of Minneapolis or San Francisco.
The fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome, but surely does not give it any greater legitimacy.
An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there’s no longer segregation in America’s schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.
I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature.
I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don’t use the gibberish of the standards writers.
Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don’t think it works that way, and I’ve been watching this for a longtime.
I’d love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I’d love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.
No Child Left Behind’s fourth-grade gains aren’t learning gains, they’re testing gains. That’s why they don’t last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.
Public school was never in business to produce Thoreau. It is in business to produce a man like Richard Nixon and, even more, a population like the one which could elect him.
We are now operating a school system in America that’s more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.
No human being who wants to read and own a book should ever have to go on a bended knee to get it.
A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.
When I was young, I was religious.
I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be ‘fixed’ – I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engines – ever asks the opinions of teachers.
In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable.
A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.
Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.
By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.
The inequalities are greater now than in ’92. Some states have equalized per-pupil spending but they set the ‘equal level’ very low, so that wealthy districts simply raise extra money privately.
It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year.
But when I went to Harvard, it kind of got washed out of me, partly because people made fun of you in college. If you said you believed in God, they would look at you clinically, you know, suggest that you needed a referral.
Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.
All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature – even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
