research for Savage Inequalities Revisited: The View from 2025
Jonathan Kozol Fought School Inequality for Decades. Here’s One Final Plea.
With his latest, and last, book, the 87-year-old writer refuses false optimism.
Jonathan
Kozol in June 2000. Since the 1960s, Mr. Kozol has written about
America’s failure to educate poor Black and Hispanic children.Credit...Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
Dana Goldstein reported from Cambridge, Mass., where she interviewed Jonathan Kozol at his home.
There
are certain motifs in Jonathan Kozol’s half-century of writing about
America’s failure to adequately educate poor Black and Hispanic
children, which began with “Death at an Early Age,” a blistering account
of his year teaching in the Boston Public Schools.
Decrepit
school buildings with rancid bathrooms and leaking ceilings. Students
stultified by scripted curriculums and endless test prep. Bleak urban
neighborhoods with neglected parks, crumbling apartments and harried,
underpaid teachers. The despair is punctuated by bright and vivacious
children, who bluntly note the obvious unfairness that adults have
trained themselves to overlook.
“Death at an Early Age,” published in 1967, turned him into the sort of widely read public intellectual hardly present anymore.
Now,
at 87, he has published “An End to Inequality,” his 15th book — and his
last, he says. It is an unapologetic cri de coeur about the
shortcomings of the schools that serve poor Black and Hispanic children,
and thus, the moral failure of the nation to end the inequality he has
documented for decades.
Critics
have long said that Mr. Kozol has focused too much on all that is wrong
in American public schooling, and not enough on models for success.
They point to the charter schools, charismatic principals and
early-reading programs driving change, even in some deeply segregated
neighborhoods.
But Mr. Kozol
characterizes those as marginal reforms meant to plug into a system that
is unequal by design. And in his long career, he has seen decades of
national reform efforts — “A Nation at Risk,” No Child Left Behind, Race
to the Top, Every Student Succeeds — come and go, while some problems
remain much the same.
Image
“If
we’re talking about Black and Latino children in our public schools, I
think it’s unrealistic to be optimistic,” Mr. Kozol said in an interview
at his home.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
Educational
opportunity is still apportioned mostly by parents’ ability to pay for
housing in desirable ZIP codes. Some aging school buildings are still
laced with lead. Black and Latino students are still disproportionately
subjected to harsh forms of discipline: silent hallways, isolation closets, even physical restraint.
“I
don’t brook with forced optimism right now,” Mr. Kozol said in an
interview. “If we’re talking about Black and Latino children in our
public schools, I think it’s unrealistic to be optimistic.”
He
spoke from an armchair in the living room of his canary yellow,
colonial home in Cambridge, Mass., where he lives alone, aided by
several young assistants. He was briefly married and divorced in the
1970s and had no children, devoting years to immersive reporting. He
spent his days inside schools and homeless shelters, and wrote by hand
late into the evening — still his favorite time to work, he said, as he
sipped an iced coffee at dusk.
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The
room was packed with teddy bears — he began collecting them when he
became too infirm to care for dogs — and old issues of left-leaning
magazines like The Nation and The Progressive. A nearby coffee table was
stacked with keepsakes, arranged for a potential acquisition, Mr. Kozol
said, of his papers by the New York Public Library.
They
included a signed photograph of Langston Hughes, which the poet sent in
1965, after Mr. Kozol, then 28, was fired for teaching a class of
mostly Black fourth-graders Mr. Hughes’s poem “Ballad of the Landlord” — then considered a subversive work by Boston administrators.
In “An End to Inequality,” Mr. Kozol uses bold language to make his case.
He
rejects the idea, popular in some education circles, that to focus on
the problems of racially segregated public schools is to encourage a
sort of deficit mind-set, in which Black, Latino and Native American
children are regarded more for what they lack than for what makes them
resilient.
“It’s
a delicate dilemma,” Mr. Kozol writes. “If we cannot speak of victims,
if the word is in disfavor, what other language can be used to speak of
children who are faced with cognitive suppression in almost every aspect
of instruction?”
Image
Mr. Kozol’s latest book, “An End to Inequality,” is his 15th — and his last, he says.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
He
continues, “Then, too, if there are no victims, then no crime has been
committed. If no crime has been committed, there can be no reason for
demanding redress for what these children undergo in their schools of
sequestration. Avoiding a disfavored word cannot expunge reality.”
The
solution, he argues, is still the yellow school bus, transporting poor
children to opportunity in more affluent neighborhoods and towns, where
they can learn alongside upper middle-class peers and enjoy some of the
advantages their parents have secured for them: rich arts programs,
foreign language classes, science labs, vibrant libraries.
The
system we have instead is nothing short of “apartheid,” Mr. Kozol
writes. The persistence of lead paint and pipes in poor children’s
schools is “cerebral genocide,” he adds, and budget cuts are evidence of
a “war on public schools.”
Mr. Kozol,
who grew up as the son of a doctor and a social worker in the affluent
Boston suburb of Newton, credits Archibald MacLeish, the modernist poet
who taught him at Harvard, with helping him develop his writing style.
“He
encouraged me to use strong words,” he recalled. “There is a tendency
to assume that the extremes of expression are always wrong, and that the
truth, by its own preference, likes to live in the middle. It doesn’t
always live in the middle.”
After college and a stint as a failed novelist in Paris, Mr. Kozol had planned to earn a Ph.D. in literature.
Image
Mr. Kozol, during a protest march that followed his dismissal from Boston Public Schools in 1965.Credit...Jonathan Kozol
His
life changed in 1964, when the civil rights activists James Chaney,
Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Mississippi.
“What am I doing here,” he recalled thinking, “hanging out in Cambridge, and talking about John Donne’s metaphysical poetry?”
Shortly
thereafter, he was teaching in Roxbury, a predominantly Black
neighborhood in Boston, and organizing alongside parents who wanted to
enroll their children in higher-quality schools, first within Boston and
eventually, in the suburbs.
Their activism helped establish a voluntary busing program called METCO, which still exists, transporting 3,000 students a year from Boston to suburban schools. Research shows
that students accepted into the program earn higher test scores and
have better college and career outcomes than students who apply to METCO
but do not win a spot in the randomized lottery.
The
big idea in Mr. Kozol’s new book is for a huge federal and state
investment — “reparations" — to expand voluntary busing programs like
METCO. Another model is voluntary two-way busing, which uses themed
magnet schools to draw middle-class students to poorer neighborhoods,
opening up seats in middle-class schools for low-income children.
While
Mr. Kozol’s writing is anything but dry, his understanding of education
research has always been careful and rigorous, said Gary Orfield,
co-director of The Civil Rights Project at the University of California,
Los Angeles, an institute that provides data on the persistence of
school segregation by race and class.
Dr.
Orfield credited Mr. Kozol for not allowing himself to get distracted
by the types of technocratic school reforms that politicians often
prefer, like increasing high-stakes testing.
“He
just is relentless,” Dr. Orfield said. “He is angry and offended by the
reality he sees going on and on and on. And nobody cares.”
Mr.
Kozol is far from a lone voice in asking the nation to refocus on
school segregation and inequalities between rich and poor districts.
Several neworganizations in Washington are devoted to these issues, and have attracted influential supporters.
But
Mr. Kozol is dismayed that mainstream Democrats rarely support big
investments in school desegregation. And he said he is not interested in
other forms of school choice, like charters or vouchers, that also help
low-income students escape underperforming schools. Like many
traditional liberals, he sees these options as financial leeches on the
public school system, and is skeptical of their support from Republicans
and conservatives.
He began writing
“An End to Inequality” before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the book barely
mentions how the crisis upended education politics, as schools in the
country’s most liberal cities were shuttered the longest, with
low-income students of color falling even further behind.
Nor does he address the fact that after the pandemic, parents — including some of those he cares most about — became morelikely to support school choice.
This omission irks some education activists, even those who admire Mr. Kozol.
“You
can’t give reparations to the system that harmed the people,” said
Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, a group that supports the
expansion of charter schools and vouchers. “You have to give it to the
people the system harmed.”
But Mr.
Kozol is sticking to the traditional notion of public education — one
system for everybody. “A democratic nation needs to have a truly
democratic, well-funded public school system,” he said.
On a table next to his armchair was a frameddrawing,
now faded, of a sun peeking out over the horizon. The artist,
Pineapple, was a tenacious girl who appears in several of his books,
chronicling the travails of growing up in the South Bronx in the wake of
the crack and AIDS epidemics.
“I asked her, ‘Is the sun rising or setting?’’ Mr. Kozol remembered. “And she looked at me and she said, ‘You decide.’”
Dana Goldstein covers education and families for The Times
What the Latest Civil Rights Data Show About Racial Disparities in Schools
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What the Latest Civil Rights Data Show About Racial Disparities in Schools
By Ileana Najarro — January 16, 2025 7 min read
Photograph of three student engineers working on a new mechanical model. Multi-ethnic group of young people in a STEM class.
Alvarez/E+
The nation’s Black and Latino students are less likely than their peers from other demographics to have access to advanced science, technology, engineering, and math courses and fully certified teachers. In addition, they’re more likely to be suspended or expelled from school—including as early as preschool—and subject to restraint and seclusion.
Those are some of the findings from new data released Jan. 16 by the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights, which show the persistence of longstanding disparities in the nation’s education system.
The agency’s Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2021-22 school year contains information from more than 17,000 school districts and 98,000 schools. These data include student enrollment and staffing figures, information on school climate, discipline rates, and more.
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The data come not only from traditional public school districts, but also charter school networks, juvenile justice facilities, multi-district magnet schools, and independent alternative and special education schools. (That explains why the data collection’s count of school districts is higher than the count from other sources, such as the National Center for Education Statistics.) The data collection has generally happened every other year since 1968—the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the 2019-20 data collection by a year—and is used to help the federal government enforce civil rights laws and for research on trends in the nation’s schools.
“The newly released data show that we cannot be complacent—that inequities in access to educational opportunities based on race, sex, and disability persist in school opportunities ranging from the number of STEM courses offered to our students to students’ experiences of suspensions in school,” outgoing U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a news release.
The new data come from the first full year of in-person learning following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many of the findings align with what researchers have seen in the recent past, said Ivy Morgan, the director of P-12 data and analytics for EdTrust, a research and advocacy group.
“Change takes time, and the pandemic exacerbated so many of the inequities that we spend so much of our time highlighting and advocating for policy solutions to remedy,” Morgan said.
The 2021-22 report also includes some data collected for the first time, such as the number of nonbinary students enrolled in school districts that collect such information.
Eleven percent of public school districts, or about 1,880 in 39 states and the District of Columbia, reported that they had nonbinary students enrolled. Some 5,200 schools reported enrolling nonbinary students, but the civil rights office only reported full data for half of those schools due to privacy reasons. Those 2,600 schools enrolled 10,800 nonbinary students.
Black and Latino students had less access to STEM courses
Algebra I is a foundational course for higher-level math, but the new civil rights data show that not all middle schools offer the course—39 percent didn’t have it in their course offerings. And access to advanced STEM courses is also uneven: just 48 percent of high schools in the 2021-22 school year offered calculus, half offered computer science, 61 percent offered physics, 67 percent offered advanced math, and 76 percent offered chemistry.
When broken down race and ethnicity, the data show that students at predominantly Black and Latino schools (those where more than 75 percent of students are Black or Latino) have less access to mathematics, science, and computer science courses than students at schools with smaller populations of these students (less than 25 percent).
For example, approximately 35 percent of schools with high enrollments of Black and Latino students offered calculus compared to 54 percent of schools with low enrollments. With computer science, 42 percent of predominantly Black or Latino high schools offered it, compared with 54 percent of schools with small Black or Latino populations.
“Part of the power of the Civil Rights Data Collection that sets it apart from so many other data sources that we have on opportunities for students of color, in particular, is that it disaggregates the data by race, ethnicity,” Morgan said. “Overall averages mask so many of the inequities that particularly Black and Latino students are facing.”
Researchers at EdTrust and elsewhere have documented racial disparities over the years in students’ access to STEM coursework that can set them up for long-term career success. These include disparities in access to Advanced Placement courses—which the new civil rights data also show.
For example, Black students represented 15 percent of total high school enrollment, but accounted for only 9 percent of students enrolled in AP computer science, 7 percent of those enrolled in an AP science course, and 6 percent of students enrolled in an AP mathematics course, according to the new civil rights data.
Latino students were similarly underrepresented in AP STEM courses while white and Asian students were overrepresented.
A handful of states have policies in place requiring that schools automatically enroll qualified students in more rigorous courses, resulting in more students of color and students from low-income families who might otherwise be overlooked for those classes taking more advanced coursework. Such policies exist to help remedy inequities in access to rigorous courses, but it can take a while for them to directly change students’ experiences, Morgan said.
Access to school counselors is far from universal
As more schools contend with growing student social-emotional needs and mental health challenges, the civil rights data show gaps in access to the kinds of school staff who can help students access services they need.
Nearly a fifth of high schools, 19 percent, didn’t have a school counselor in the 2021-22 school year, according to the civil rights data. Those schools served about 5 percent of the nation’s high school students.
The American School Counselor Association recommends that schools employ one counselor for every 250 students, but that ratio stood at one for every 385 students during the 2022-23 school year, according to the association, which analyzed federal data.
And sometimes, schools had a school resource officer or security guard without having a counselor, nurse, or psychologist.
The new civil rights data show that approximately 42,700 public schools (44 percent) had at least one sworn law enforcement officer or security guard in 2021-22. Of these schools, 5,300, or 12 percent, did not have a school counselor. Two percent of the schools with school resource officers or security guards, about 850 in total, did not have a school counselor, social worker, nurse, or psychologist.
Black students and American Indian or Alaska Native students were 1.3 times more likely than white students to attend a school with a resource officer or security guard but no school counselor. Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander students were 1.2 times more likely than white students to have this experience.
Students of color were less likely to have certified teachers
Racial disparities also popped up when looking at whether students had teachers who met all state certification requirements.
Only about 537,700 students, or 1 percent of all students nationwide, attended public schools where fewer than half of teachers met all state certification requirements. But a majority of these students, 68 percent, were Black and Latino.
Black and Latino students were also more likely to face more serious discipline—suspensions, expulsions, and restraint and seclusion—continuing a historical trend.
For example, Black boys represented 8 percent of K-12 student enrollment, but accounted for 18 percent of students who received one or more in-school suspensions, 22 percent who received one or more out-of-school suspensions, and 21 percent who were expelled. Similar discipline disparities also applied to Black girls, Hispanic boys, white boys, and boys of two or more races.
And these disparities started as early as preschool, where Black children accounted for 18 percent of preschool enrollment but 38 percent of children who received one or more out-of-school suspensions and 33 percent of those expelled.
As President-elect Donald Trump takes power on Jan. 20, and management at the Education Department and its office for civil rights changes, Morgan hopes that investment in the Civil Rights Data Collection continues. During the first Trump administration, the Education Department added questions about religious harassment and sexual assault at school and cut back on questions about school spending, teacher absenteeism, course access, and preschool suspensions.
“Everyone agrees that the nation’s education system can do a lot more to serve all students better, but we cannot fix the problems unless we have the data that tells us that they exist,” she said.
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