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Special Report
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Attacking apartheid education
An interview with Jonathan Kozol
Alarmed to discover the nation's urban districts once again hyper-segregating black children, Jonathan Kozol has written a powerful narrative account of the desperate conditions so many minority students now endure. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (Crown) is the latest call to action from the National Book Award-winning author of Savage Inequalities. A veteran educator who refers to the inner-city children whose lives he documents as "my family," Kozol, 69, is dedicated to promoting social justice in the nation's schools. "I'm going to keep fighting on this issue until my dying day," he vowed in a recent interview that amounted to an enjoyable and eye-opening filibuster. Here's the long-play version.
In the book, you tap into the experience of being radicalized on this issue. What do you think it will take for enough folks to get radicalized today to tackle the apartheid schooling issue in a meaningful way?
I think there are far more ethically enlightened people in this nation on this subject than one would suspect from the policies of government. The sweeping return to racial segregation in our schools did not initiate primarily in attitudinal resistance from white people. The primary cause is a series of devastating decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court beginning around 1990, decisions which have ripped apart the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education by dismantling virtually all of its instruments of enforcement. Even worse, the federal courts have increasingly opposed even voluntary integration programs.
You're talking about St. Louis, where the state actually discouraged a successful integration program between the city and suburbs.
Yes. It's extraordinary. Look at the words of the great Theodore Shaw, who's the head of the NAACP Defense Fund. He says it's Orwellian that the Supreme Court and the federal district courts have even come to the point of curtailing voluntary programs, as in St. Louis. This is the direct consequence of a Supreme Court that seems determined not only to rip apart the entire life's work of Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, but to return our nation to the status quo preceding Plessy v. Ferguson. For those who forget, Plessy v. Ferguson at least promised that if schools were to be segregated, they would be equal. We have not just trampled on the legacy of Brown, we have not even lived up to the promises of Plessy. The schools are shamefully segregated, more so than ever before in three decades, and they are blatantly unequal.
You present research to support your premise that there's not the public antipathy to integration of schools that's commonly assumed. Given that, how do you tap into that wellspring of support? You discuss starting with some of the easier districts first-Des Moines before New York, perhaps. You talk about getting testimonials from those who have benefited from integrated schools and getting them involved. What are some other ways people can rise up for integration?
First of all, we have to fight as politically and militantly as possible to preserve the very successful inter-district integration programs that exist already. I'm speaking specifically of the inter-district program in St. Louis, which is now under federal attack; the one in Milwaukee; and the very large program in the Boston area. There are others elsewhere in the country. But these are cases in which, no matter what the mass media likes to imply about black preferences, parents of black people make it overwhelmingly clear that they believe their children will receive a better education in a school that has at least a substantial number of white and privileged people.
You cited a 6 to 1 preference for that in one survey.
That's right. And they attempted to reverse the program in, I believe it was, Louisville. But black parents said by 6-1 that they did not want to revert to segregation, the old order. In St. Louis, even though the state has already begun cutting back funding for the program, applications have increased. This year there are 6,000 applicants for about 1,300 slots. In Boston, where the program is only partially subsidized by the state, about 32 suburbs-including most of the top suburban districts-participate in an integration program on a voluntary basis, which admits inner-city children from Boston. There are 3,300 kids in the program right now. There are 16,000 minority kids on the waiting list. That represents about a third of all the minority children in Boston.
So have black parents given up on integration? Not where it's a genuine option, and not where it is handled with sensitivity and shrewdness. I might add to this that the success rates of students who participate in these programs have not been seriously questioned. They are spectacular. I'll stick to the Boston program, although I gave similar statistics in the book for Milwaukee. In Boston, the typical student-nobody has an exact figure because it's terribly hard to disengage all the various factors which go into the statistics-but my own impression based on first-hand experience is that more than 90 percent of the minority kids who go to the suburban schools in Boston graduate and go on to four-year colleges. The figures for inner-city Boston and similar segregated school systems are more like 30 or 40 percent who not only get to 12th grade but go on to higher education. In fact, it's probably less than 30 percent in most of these cities. So when black parents make this choice, they're making a well-informed choice. They know what they're doing. And I argue that so long as black folks still opt for these programs, the suburbs have an obligation to open their doors wider than ever to accommodate every inner-city child who wants to share in the first-rate, high-funded education that's available in these suburbs.
How can this be done? Well, obviously we need a better federal court. We're not going to get that anytime in the near future. It is still possible for ethically committed people in the suburbs to expand these programs by fighting like hell in their state legislatures to demand full state reimbursement for the districts that accept these kids. Most of the districts that do this do so out of moral conviction, and also out of the sense that integrated schooling in the long run is in the advantage of their own white children who are going to grow up in a multiracial society. They shouldn't also have to pay for it with their own local property taxes. There should be a highly mobilized struggle in every state where such programs are possible to humiliate state legislators if they try to undermine these programs, and to force them in any way we can to provide every cent it takes to make them possible. In cases where the states won't do it, I still think these affluent suburbs have enough money so they ought to do it on their own.
And I'm going back and forth across the country speaking, among other audiences, precisely to those privileged people and telling them that they-especially the younger people in these districts-have an obligation to reignite the struggle that their parents' generation has abandoned. It's extraordinary: Whenever I say this, the audience interrupts me and applauds. I'm talking not just about 19-year-old radical college kids, but I'm talking about the mainstream of young white adults who are bringing standing-room-only crowds to every appearance I'm doing. It's interesting. We live in a conservative era, but I'm seeing bigger crowds than at any time since 1968. So that's one way to attack it.
Another avenue of struggle is to support members of Congress who have introduced a constitutional amendment that would establish education for the first time as a fundamental right of all children in this nation. Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois introduced this amendment initially. It now has a multitude of co-sponsors in the House of Representatives. Most Americans are under the mistaken impression that education is already protected by the federal Constitution. It is not. In Rodriguez, which went to the Supreme Court in the early 1970s, the Nixon Court ruled that the 14th Amendment does not apply to equal education. So at present, there's no constitutional protection for children-rich, poor, black, brown or white-in our public system. A constitutional amendment would establish that right, and only at that point will we be able to hold our federal government accountable for guaranteeing equal education even if the states and local districts are resistant. And it's only in that way that we can ever compel the federal government to put up the money to make it possible.
There are a lot of ways that government can create incentives for good integrated schooling in America. It can do it by direct grants to any school district that opts to open its doors to minority children who live 20 minutes away, typically. It's usually not as long a bus ride as the press frequently exaggerates. The kids in the South Bronx that I know, for example, could go to the top-rated schools of a suburb called Bronxville. The kids in the South Bronx get an education worth $11,000. You plunk them down in Bronxville, which is just a 15-minute ride, and they'd be getting a $19,000 education. They'd also be going to integrated schools.
The federal government could provide massive incentives to suburban districts to make these programs possible. It could also be done under a federal law that gave preferential property tax exemptions to school districts that opened their doors wide to minority children. It could be done in a multitude of similar ways. In fact, President Bush would have done a lot more good for a lot more inner-city children if, instead of wasting so many hundreds of millions of dollars in this sociopathic testing agenda-which is largely an unfunded mandate, so the schools are forced to divert scarce funds to test-prep programs and the like-he could have done a lot more good for minority children if he'd taken all that money and turned it into incentives for racially integrated programs throughout the country.
But there's a third thing we need to do. And that is, this is not going to happen solely from legislation or litigation. I've followed all the local court suits and occasionally we'd win a victory in one state or another, but then the legislatures almost always undercut these victories, as in Ohio, for example, where Gov. Taft has openly defied four court orders from the supreme court of the state to equalize school funding. He's done it with impunity. In the long run, we're not going to win by limiting this struggle to local equity cases.
In the long run-and this is why I favor the constitutional amendment-school equality will never be possible until all our public schools are funded out of the real wealth of our nation. That means out of a steeply graduated federal income tax. And you may say this isn't going to happen for a long while, because of our loyalty to states' rights and local control, but I would answer in the following way: I predict that at some point in the next century, the United States will join almost all other modern, developed Western nations and fund education out of federal resources. I predict it will happen not only for ethical reasons, but for reasons of national self-interest. After all, children do not go to school to learn to be the citizens of Spokane, Washington, or Des Moines, Iowa. They go to school to be Americans. And they don't swear a Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of Arizona or Pennsylvania. They pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States.
They already take tests that are essentially national tests. When they apply to college they are compared to all other children in America when they take the SAT. If they are in inner-city schools they are essentially being given a national curriculum, which is one out of a handful of so-called scientifically based programs the White House approves. And when they grow up, they're going to vote in national elections, they're going to serve in a national military, they're going to cross state borders constantly in search of jobs. Even those at the bottom levels of the pay scale will often be serving in very sensitive jobs, such as those overwhelmingly minority men and women who now handle security at airports. In the long run, it's not to our national interest to allow the education of our people to be left up to the whim of the village elders of some small town in New Hampshire or the wealth or poverty of a district in Connecticut or Minnesota.
And we need a national political movement in order to force this to happen. It's not going to happen through incremental gestures and more tampering with local and state funding formulas. That doesn't work. I've been at it for 40 years. Savage Inequalities was a best-selling book, and yet the inequalities are still there. They're worse in many cases because we now have the situation of wealthy parents adding private funds to their public schools. We now have this phenomenon that I call hybrid schools. They're public in that they get public funds, and private in that the parents can raise extra money to diminish class size and hire extra teachers. So it's not going to happen at the local level. It's going to take not only a massive political movement, it's also going to take inspired leadership, and I don't think that leadership is going to come out of the present generation of members of Congress or presidential candidates. I think the leadership is going to have to come, as it did in the 1960s, out of the grassroots.
I want to tie a few threads of what you said into a question about politics, especially about that proposed constitutional amendment. In terms of the sold-out audiences you're speaking to, there are issues of manufactured consent in our society on the conservative side, and there are also issues of the tiredness of the liberal agenda that you discuss-progressives who are worn out-and yet you see the packed halls and you start to see there is a spark there waiting to light a bigger fire. It seems to me that this constitutional amendment is very smart because it's hard to oppose on any kind of moral grounds, and so it forces the hand of people who like to engage in Orwellian tactics. If you get enough people to come out against it, don't you win that way, too, because you then spark a movement based on the outrage people would feel if politicians have the temerity to oppose guaranteeing every child's right to an education?
Absolutely right. The reason why massive numbers of citizens ought to be supporting and talking about Congressman Jackson's amendment is not simply that we hope it will someday be passed and ratified in our lifetime or the next generation, but more important to educate the public, to force the issue, to force those who vote against it to stand up in public and say, "I'm opposed to equality. I'm opposed to having the United States flag protect these children even though we expect them to grow up to be loyal to that flag."
I think of it all the time because I stand in classes when kids say the Pledge of Allegiance. By the way, I'm not opposed to the Pledge of Allegiance, but as it stands now it mocks reality. I watch these little black kids in a vile-looking school-there's not a white kid in the building and there are 40 children in the high school class, and they're talking about "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." I don't worry about the God part. The real issue is that statement is a lie, and it's obvious to them. How could this nation be indivisible if they've sequestered in such sublimely perfect isolation? How can there be liberty and justice for all when they're getting only half as much money to spend on their schooling as the children of my Harvard classmates.
The kids, they say it so fast if they say it at all, that it just becomes a lot of syllables. One reason that I know it doesn't work-and this might lead us into talking about curriculum a little bit-in the South Bronx, over a period of years up until very recently, they were enforcing a rote-and-drill curriculum-perhaps the worst one in the country, which is called Success for All, and I marvel, by the way, at the Orwellian chutzpa of Robert Slavin and his colleagues who have the audacity to use a phrase so utterly immodest. It would have been accurate possibly to say, "A bit more success for some" or "More success temporarily for a small number," but anyway this school was a Success for All school and I describe it in detail in chapter three in my book. By the way, I say in the book I visited like nine other schools where I've watched the same curriculum used, but two nights ago in St. Louis, people reminded me I've visited 10 of those schools, because before I even started writing this book, I visited a school in St. Louis where they were doing it-again, a totally segregated school.
So here's this program in the Bronx where every minute is calibrated to state-ordained standards that will be tested on exams, where the teachers are handed a script from which they are not permitted to deviate even to tell the children an amusing anecdote that comes into their mind, where even the most incandescent, exciting young teachers are not permitted to tell the kids something wonderful that happened on the weekend, where the teacher isn't even allowed to let the child ramble on, as little kids love to do, telling her a story about what he or she did on Sunday afternoon at the zoo, little 7-year-olds love to tell you stories like that.
Maybe this little boy saw a baby bear at the zoo on Sunday and he wants to tell everybody about it. Or maybe he wants to say something that's really funny, or something that's sad. You know, 7-year-olds are like artists at the delectable run-on sentence. I happen to be all in favor of letting kids write run-on sentences. Once they write something that matters to them, it's pretty damn easy to show them how to break it up into acceptable sentences. The real struggle is to enable them to write something that matters to them in the first place. Well, in Success for All this is not allowed. Everything they write is predicted in the script.
In any case, I regret this particularly because in really good suburban schools, where they're not under this sort of high-stakes test-even though they have to take the test, they know their kids are going to do pretty well-in these schools where the school day is still relaxed and the teachers are not in a state of perpetual test anxiety, the first-grade teacher can let this little boy ramble on for a while. And children are just wonderful at wandering off into the blissful kingdom of irrelevance. Sometimes at the end of all those ands and buts, if you listen long enough there's a piece of hidden treasure, and a good teacher uses that piece of hidden treasure as the key with which to unlock motivation, and that's the point when the child has said something that brings him nearly to the point of tears perhaps that the good teacher says, "Ok, get that pad of paper and write all that down, and next week we'll worry about making sure the nouns and verbs match up." That's what happens in the best schools in America.
In the Success for All schools the teacher is not allowed to do this. And I'll broaden that statement: This is true in all these heavily scripted, test-driven schools where the principals are in a state of perpetual anxiety because of the threat of sanctions and humiliation. So in these schools the teacher has to cut that little boy off, because he may want to talk of tears of laughter, but tears and laughter won't be tested on the standardized exam. There's nothing in NCLB about the sorrows of a child's heart or the laughter that comes naturally from a child's spirit when he's in a reasonably healthy public school. You can't find the word "happiness" anywhere in NCLB. There's no reference to beauty, there's no reference to aesthetics. It's all about the numbers we can paste on children's foreheads, numbers which reflect only the most narrow possible range of skills.
So the teacher in these schools can never draw upon the motivation that's hidden in the child's heart; instead, she has to apply an externally created motivation which is driven by essentially a Skinnerian principle of stimulus response, which derives directly from rat-control psychology, which was largely discredited years ago, when I was a Harvard undergraduate. In suburban schools, children are being enabled to ask interesting questions, they're being educated to interrogate reality, they're being educated also to read beautiful children's books, to inherit all of the treasures of this earth. In the drill-and-kill curriculum in the inner-city schools, there's often no real literature. I've actually studied SFA and seen it so often, I could teach it. I guess if any school wants an SFA teacher…
You've got the hand gestures down?
I do.
It seems to breed either absolute depression or fascism in the teachers, from the way you describe it.
Absolutely. I recently asked SFA to let me see a picture of the hand signals and I notice they sent me an updated picture in which the elbow was bent. But almost all the SFA classrooms I've visited, when the teacher wants silence, that arm shoots straight out at an upward diagonal with the hand held flat, fingers straight.
How could you not see the symbolism of that?
At the school in the Bronx which I describe in my book, the teachers-I learn everything from the teachers. The teachers kept meeting with me after school. Some of them were teachers I had recruited to go into the inner-city schools. Everywhere I go, when I meet terrific, exciting and personally exhilarating, well-educated college seniors or people in graduate schools of education, I tell the boring ones to go to the suburbs, but the ones that are really fun to be with, I say, "You go into the inner city, because that's where they need you most. There isn't enough joy there. Go and teach there." And then these teachers call me up after a few years and say, "I'm going crazy. They're making me turn these babies into robotic examination soldiers. This isn't the way I was educated to get into Cornell or Harvard."
Do you think there's an intentional-
Let me say one more thing. I know I give long answers. I've learned from the children.
It's an enjoyable filibuster, though.
I've learned from the children. I just love these kids who meander off into that kingdom of irrelevance and I've learned so much about what the kids need when I listen to them. The best advice I was ever given in education was given to me by probably the most beloved man in America, who died two years ago and was my mentor.
Fred Rogers?
Fred Rogers. He taught me more than any curriculum program ever taught me about education. He said, "Jonathan, you have to give teachers time to listen to these children." He came with me to the Bronx to visit schools, and I noticed he practiced what he preached. He listened so carefully, and when you listen and the kids know you're not going to cut them off, that's when they open up. That's when kids who seem tough and resistant at first, suddenly vent their feelings. Sometimes they're not angry feelings; sometimes they're charmingly amusing feelings.
But let me finally say this: In this particular school… I'm on the side of inner-city principals. They've been placed in virtually a state of siege. Even before NCLB, as you know many states were already doing this. And what happens is, these teachers, because they have to hold timers in their hands-fortunately they've abolished this program now in New York and have gone to balanced literacy. But this was the program for a long while, and it's still in 1,300 schools around the country. The teachers, there was virtually no time to teach history or geography. There was virtually no art or music, which were considered frills. Even the teachers who tried to sneak in a little history were usually cut off by the people they called the curriculum police. They called them the SFA cops. Those were the words several of the teachers used when we met after school. They were also the ones who said to me, "We call it the Hitler salute." And they said it without a sense of irony and outrage. But anyway…
Do you think that perversity is intentional? How can you miss teaching kids to respond with silence and obedience to a fascist salute?
Well-educated teachers hate it. Needless to say, Jewish teachers hate it most. But look, the people who design these programs undoubtedly say, "No, we didn't mean it that way. It wasn't meant to be that severe." But what happens is it's a combination of the program itself and the desperation of the principals in these schools, and the high-stakes tests, and the sense of siege, and the fact that these programs are so damn boring that people do act up, that leads even enlightened teachers to take an already bad idea and make it worse. I know some SFA teachers who insist on softening the gesture by opening their fingers a little, bending their elbows slightly… But I was in one school in Hartford where a teacher tried to soften the "zero-noise salute" so it wouldn't look exactly like the Hitler Youth, but she still hated it. In a whisper to me while I was in her class, she said, "You know, Jonathan, I can do this with my dog."
I read that in the book.
Jesus Christ.
Exactly.
We wouldn't do this to golden retrievers, I don't think. But we do it to black and Latino kids. But the last point I was trying to make long ago is that, I talked with a whole bunch of kids who had been to this particular school, P.S. 65. They were now in middle school, but they'd been there for the five, six, seven preceding years. It was a K-5 school so they'd been there for six years. I mention this in the book where one of the kids asks me, they know I lived in Massachusetts because they always asked where my dog was. They once made me bring my dog to New York, too. I left that out of the book, but they insisted I bring her to New York. They couldn't understand why dogs are not allowed to sit with you on the plane. I agree with them. I'd much rather sit next to a golden retriever than some businessman. But anyway I had to drive her to New York, because I obey these children, especially Pineapple, who bossed me around.
Anyway, they said, "Is Massachusetts in New York?" I was struck by that, because these were kids who were already 12, 13, 14 years old, and I thought I knew them pretty well. So I said, "No, it's a different state." And at that word, "state," they looked confused, okay? So I decided to teach an old-fashioned lesson in cities, states and countries. I can do that. There's nothing wrong with sitting down and teaching a real lesson. I'm not one of those rhapsodic wheat-germ teachers who, when children spontaneously ask to know where Afghanistan is, then we'll tell them. I think a lot of the open classrooms I used to see, which I opposed, represented a virtual abdication of adulthood, and I think that just set us up for this right-wing reaction. When people like Bill Bennett, Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch attack liberal education, they're not attacking what really happens in suburban schools. There are no suburban schools like that anymore. They're attacking their memory of these wheat-germ academies in 1969, and rightly so. But they've created this false polarity.
Anyway, I said, "What country do we live in?" And none of these kids could tell me the country they lived in. These kids were not brain-damaged, they'd been in school for at least six years, some seven or eight, they'd been in a curriculum called Success for All and they didn't know what country they live in! The first answer was, "The Bronx?" And also they'd been taught to be so passive they didn't even say it assertively. They asked it as a question: "The Bronx?" I said, "No." And I knew them well enough that… I worried about humiliating them, but they know that they're like my family, these kids. They knew I loved them so I felt it was okay to do this. I said, "No, that's wrong." And some of them said, "New York?" I said, "No." And they looked dumbfounded.
Finally, the oldest of the girls, who I guess was in eighth grade by then, I took out a dollar bill and I gave it to her and she read it. She studied it for a long time, too, before she realized why I'd given it to her. Finally she said, "The United States?" Even then she wasn't sure enough to state it as a fact. Now I'm sure they'd said the Pledge of Allegiance, but it had washed right over them. It didn't mean anything to them. This is an extreme example, but I found the same thing in similar schools, whether they were using Success for All or Open Court, which to me is almost as mediocre as SFA, I'd find this repeated.
Because the curriculum has been narrowed to such a tiny spectrum of proficiencies, most of these kids have absolutely no sense of where they exist in time or place. It's not just that they can't locate themselves on the longitude and latitude of a map, they can't even differentiate significantly between the birth of Christ, the Montgomery bus boycott and the year when they were born. White people who are inclined to buy into the racist views of Charles Murray, for example, if they were to meet these kids they'd think they were stupid. These drill-and-grill curricula are not simply insufferably boring, mediocre in their intellectual levels, stripped bare of any opportunity to enjoy literature, which is the only reason to read it anyway, but they also are taking up so much time that they're locking out all the other ingredients of genuine cultural education.
They contend that if this is all you do-you visit P.S. 65 and you spend half the year drilling the kids for the tests and the rest of the time is herding them through the scripted lessons in SFA-it is true that you can temporarily pump the test scores for the Level 1s and Level 2s a few percentage points. And in these schools, by the way, teachers are cynically instructed to concentrate to the children who are closest to the edge between Level 2 and Level 3. The top Level is 4 and 1 is the bottom. Anyway, I saw this in New York and a teacher in St. Louis told me she was forced to do this, too.
As I travel around the country, in any instance where I worry that I might have overstated in my book I now find I understated. Teachers in many of these schools are encouraged, strongly advised to give their greatest attention to children who are high Level 2s so that by targeting maybe five, six kids in the class, there's a chance at pushing two or three of them across the line to Level 3, from not quite proficient to proficient. And that's all it takes to come up with a spectacular percentile gain. It's utterly cynical, it's led to forcing our teachers to betray their best principles, and it ends up occasionally with a temporary, illusory testing gain which is not a genuine learning gain.
Even if the test scores authentically go up a few points, it doesn't endure. I meet the same kids four years later when they're in the eighth grade and they can't write a cogent sentence and they can't read a social studies textbook. At best, they can read the sentences phonetically. They read like phonetic drones, but without any comprehension let alone enthusiasm. They're like sleepwalking phonetically. I'm not opposed to phonics, as long as phonics are incorporated sensibly into an instructional program which also includes genuine literature, which places its highest emphasis on comprehension, and which draws as much as possible on the literary offerings that children themselves bring forward to us, rather than on these insufferable pit-pat readers. I don't oppose phonics; I taught phonics. It's an important element of any balanced instructional approach for the children who need it. I have no political animosity toward a consonant blend or a short O or long A. I've taught school.
You have to take pains to point things out like that because some of your critics paint you as a caricature sometimes.
The distinction between highly disciplined, proto-military, test-driven, drill-and-kill instruction for minorities on the one hand, and some sort of rhapsodic and euphoric totally unstructured education for white children on the other is a false polarity. It doesn't exist. To the extent that it does, it's a case of overwhelmingly black and Hispanic schools being misled by their principals into thinking that white education-and they sometimes will use the term "white education"-is unstructured, aimless and therefore ill-suited to poor children. This is nonsense.
In order to write this book, I had to keep going back to suburban schools to make sure I remembered what happens on the other side of that wall. The good suburban schools I visited-and not just the rich districts like Newton and Brookline, Massachusetts, but typical white suburbs-consistently teach children with a sensitive and smart and sophisticated balance of carefully structured, sequential and highly intentional instructional programs including a very sensible use of phonics in coordination with rich classroom libraries filled with all the sorrows of Eeyore and all the joys of Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet and all of the other beautiful children's literature. They also derive most of their writing from the stories that originate in the hearts of their children, and they deliver high performance and they actually permit their children to enjoy the hours of their childhood, and they also teach them to think critically about their society so that when they grow up they can be effective and politically sagacious adults.
And then I go back to these inner-city schools… In California it's not SFA, it's Open Court, and I see these kids, their eyes just glazed over, they're not learning to ask questions. White, middle-class kids will learn to ask the questions. These kids are being trained to give the answers. The president keeps saying, "It's working, we're narrowing the race gap." That's a deadly lie. It's not working. If it were working, we wouldn't see black twelfth graders reading at, on average, the level of white seventh graders, because this agenda started a long time ago. The rote-and-drill mechanistic accountability technicians have had at least a decade to prove to us that they were right. The people who said, "We know what works and it's scientifically based and here are the seven ways to do it" have had plenty of time to convince us that they were right. And after all these years, our high schools are filled with black and Latino ninth graders who drop out in masses because they can't comprehend subject matter. The typical inner-city high schools I visit have an even higher drop-out rate than most school districts admit.
We saw that in Texas.
Yeah, we saw it in Houston, where the "Texas Miracle" turned out to be a lie. And the fudging of the graduation rates has taken place in Chicago and New York as well. But the typical inner-city high schools I visit, if they have 1,500 ninth graders, typically if they're lucky they'll have 400 twelfth graders, and of those maybe 200 graduate, and of those maybe 80 get into four-year colleges. So what happened to all those other children? Did they die in the interim? No, they either dropped out or they were pushed out, and the systems cover that up by saying they're going to take GEDs or something like that.
These aren't just bad statistics, these are plague statistics. President Bush is lying to the nation when he keeps promoting his plan. His worst sin, I think, is when he attacks the teachers in these schools. If the AYPs-and I hate the language of school accountability because it's junk jargon, but you have to use it, I guess-don't go up by the right number of percentage points to make Mr. Bush and his acolytes happy, if they don't meet their "benchmarks" or their "rubric," the president says if your scores don't go up, even if you have 40 kids in a class, the classroom's smelly and you don't have any real books in your class, it's the teacher's fault. She's guilty of "the soft bigotry of low expectations." And he keeps repeating it. I sometimes think once he finds a phrase he can pronounce, he just won't give it up. But what an outrage. Most of the teachers I meet have the highest expectations. They don't need George Bush to tell them they have to strive for excellence. He says that, too. It's as if we teachers came into this profession because we had a secret genetic predilection for mediocrity. Thank you, Mr. Bush. Excellence-we never thought of that.
When you have Bill Bennett's comment recently about the aborting of all black babies, are we nearing a backlash against this mindset, that will be spurred on to some extent by what you're writing?
I think so. I think there's a tremendous backlash coming. I go on what I see. I can tell you, in the past approximately three-and-a-half weeks, I've probably talked to about 10,000 teachers, and at least 1,000 of them have been able to talk back to me. They're the ones that keep me up all night sitting and talking. Sometimes when they close the lecture hall, these young teachers-and some of the older teachers, too, including many of the wise and seasoned African-American teachers who have been in the trenches for a long time-are in a state of outrage at the distortion of curriculum, at the sociopathic and repetitive nature of the testing agenda, at the fact that these high-stakes tests are of no use to them anyway because the results never come back until the end of the school year, at the persistence of fierce inequalities, at the implacable segregation of these schools, but more than anything else, at the fact that their own profession has been degraded by an ideology and lexicon that come straight out of the world of technocratic business management and corporate priorities. I can't tell you how many teachers are outraged when the principal of the school has been so intimidated by the so-called corporate partners that she no longer calls herself the principal but announces to visitors, "I'm the CEO of this school."
I think Paul Vallas started that in Chicago.
Paul Vallas did more damage to education in Chicago… and now he's brought the curse to Philadelphia.
So anyway, you walk in and meet the CEO…
Through endemic low funding of inner-city schools, we have forced inner-city principals to form alliances with corporate leaders. And businesses love to proclaim, "We are your business partner." So the very same real-estate firms and mortgage lending firms that are the prime architects of residential segregation in America come into these segregated schools and say, "We'll be glad to help you with some mentors." That sounds genteel and nice at the start. But it's usually ephemeral. And they're not real partners. They come in like British viceroys telling their local ethnic counterpart what to do to train the kind of students that they need for their industrial or other mercantile purposes. The principal never gets to tell her business partner what he ought to do to stop segregating American society, right? But this CEO gets the right to tell her, "We need you to train kids to think in business terms."
So some of these principals, if they don't call themselves CEOs will say, "I'm the building manager." That makes me feel sorry for them. We have a beautiful profession. And in these same schools the teachers are often called the classroom managers. In some schools in Ohio, the kids are taught to be managers, too. They have titles like Pencil Sharpener Manager. I was so stunned by that, I made a trip back to Columbus to take pictures of the signs because I didn't think anybody would believe me. Like the Paper-Passer-Outer Manager? So there's a continuum from the kindergartener to the principal, and good teachers hate this. They tell me they didn't go to college and study the history of philosophy and American and British literature or take courses in social ethics and anthropology in order to come into a public school and be appointed a branch manager for industry or a drill sergeant for the state. They wanted to come into these schools to give these children the same terrific education they received, and to say there is discontent would be a very mild understatement.
And school systems are doing everything they can to recruit these idealistic young teachers. In New York, former Chancellor Harold Levy, who's a very nice guy and a friend of mine, did everything he could to recruit from the top colleges. And I helped him recruit. Everywhere I go, I say to people, "You want to change the world? Don't just go out and demonstrate about sweatshops in Indonesia. Do something about the cancer of apartheid education on the body of American democracy. Go into these schools and try to make a difference here and now." And they do it. These young people are also steeped in the history of civil rights. They've gone to colleges where they've really studied that. They are in a state of fierce indignation at what they are being compelled to do in these apartheid schools, which have adopted what is essentially an apartheid curriculum-a curriculum that would be rejected out of hand in any of the good suburban districts of America. These teachers just pour out their hearts to me.
I ask teachers who are angry enough to do something about it to protest. And not just by writing tortured letters to Ed Week, but by actually walking out of class once a year with thousands of other teachers to denounce these practices. They're angry, and I beg them, "Don't quit." A lot of them want to quit after two or three years. I say, "Don't drift off to law school or business school" like their parents tell them they ought to do. "Don't drift off to the best suburban schools where admittedly you won't have to put up with much of this. Stay where you're needed most, but fight the good fight there."
I always tell them to fight it on two levels. First, do the best damn job you can to be a terrific teacher, because if you're really marvelous at what you do, the parents will defend you if you're under threat from people in administration, especially if you're in an elementary school. And besides, if you're a really terrific teacher, principals will put up with a lot of mischievous curriculum subversion on your part. They won't want to lose you. So I tell teachers the first thing is to do a good job. Teach the skills, but don't do it in the mindless way that is prescribed. Do not waste the school's time writing the number of the standards on the blackboard for everything you want to teach. In the suburban schools the principals tell the teachers to wink at that requirement. If you want to teach a good poem by William Butler Yeats, just write on the blackboard, "Outcome: To enjoy William Butler Yeats."
These teachers hate the things they're made to do, and there's going to be an upheaval in this country. I don't know when it will come. I hope it comes sooner rather than later. I hope it starts in the ranks of these good, young teachers who really do believe in the good things that most of their parents supported. These young people want to fight the same fight that Dr. King died for. I tell them, "Do the best job you can in the classroom and pick your battles carefully, but on some matters speak out and take a stand." If you're forced to do something that's a betrayal of your profession, just say no. The teachers cheer whenever I say that. I tell them, if they get fired don't worry because the world is not as dangerous as your parents make you think. Every good teacher I know who's ever been fired for a noble reason ended up with a better job within two years. You'll find another inner-city principal who will want you. Look for the principals who haven't lost their souls yet, and there are plenty like that. … We need as many charismatic people as we can find, but charisma is not a substitute for systematic justice. I'm going to keep fighting on this issue until my dying day.
Let's talk about the concept of economic integration-integrating districts so schools have equal numbers of low-income students. Do you like the idea of reframing integration along economic lines?
Not really, but if it turns out to be a politically viable strategy, for God's sake I'll support it.
Because the outcome, given the tremendous poverty of inner-city minority families, would be the same in terms of racial integration.
That's right. A lot of people in cities like New York and Chicago-old liberals or tired liberals or neo-liberals or whatever they are, and I think of neo-liberals as some kind of odd vegetable like eggplant or something-but anyway, these people love to say to me, "Jonathan, I agree with everything you write, but is it really race, or is it economic class that's at stake?" They'll do anything they can to shift the argument to economic class for a very good reason-because economic injustice does not humiliate America the way that racial injustice does.
We all agree that it's not a good thing to discriminate economically, but it seems to be a sin shared by most modern, developed nations. Whereas the evisceration, the cognitive decapitation of people of color is the particular sin of the United States, along with a few other nations, such as South Africa. This is the area where we are embarrassed in the eyes of the rest of the world, and this is the area where white liberals in cities like New York-which is part of the most segregated state in the nation-are the most embarrassed. They'll do anything to say, "Isn't it just poor people rather than black people?" And the answer is no, it's not. Yes, it's true there are poor rural schools in America, or white working-class schools, but as bleak as they are, they are not lazarettos. They don't stink. They don't have 40 kids in a classroom that has enough space only for 20. They don't put half their children into trailers in the parking lot and call them classrooms. There's an intensity of immiseration in these hyper-segregated inner-city schools that I find nowhere else in America, even in low-income white schools. There is a difference. Race is the peculiar crime of our society, and racially separate and unequal schooling is the particular sin of American education. But having said that, it's a distinction without a difference.
Once economic integration bumped up against Brown, you wouldn't have the problem of Brown anymore.
That's right. And I believe in any realistic strategy that works. In fact this is a distinction without a difference because overwhelmingly black and Latino schools also inevitably have the highest concentration of children in poverty. So if it helps us to get around the benighted rulings of the federal courts by calling it economic integration instead of racial integration, I'm all in favor because it'll have the same effect at least in the short run.
Pragmatically it could work. But it's a shame that we don't want to face the reality and call segregation what it is. So much of what you write about is the refusal to call things what they are.
Some educators, including those who call themselves school reformers, never speak about this. They will offer their seven scientifically proven things that work. They will offer their seven ways to fix apartheid, segregated and unequal schooling. But they will never come right out and say that the things they're proposing are really ways we might achieve Plessy v. Ferguson. They ought to be more honest about it.
If school reformers, even those who think they're liberals, are going to keep on talking about a more innovative way to teach reading to segregated children or of smaller and more intimate segregated schools in which to teach inner-city children, or a more disciplined way to teach reading to inner-city children, they ought to have the guts to say, "Look, I've given up on everything that Dr. King lived and died for. If I still believe in it, I'm afraid to say it anymore, so here's my plan for making happy segregation. Here's my seven-point plan for successful apartheid schooling." Be honest. If you've given up on that struggle, don't go through some half-baked ritual to honor Martin Luther King on his birthday because that's sheer hypocrisy. You don't have the right to honor Dr. King. You've already dishonored him.
I want to make one final point: I'm not opposed to high standards. I believe in the highest possible standards, and that's why I condemn these culturally barren and intellectually mediocre scripted programs. I would beg teachers to be very careful even when a good idea comes along not to let it become codified to the point where it hardens into concrete. Especially in inner-city schools, principals will cling to anything that offers them hope.
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