Like kindness, cleanliness and promptness of provision, it is not secured by gravity of need but by the cash, skin color and class status of the applicant. At Public School 24 in Riverdale, the principal speaks enthusiastically of his teaching staff. You could also argue, I suppose, that children at expensive high schools do not really profit from their access to so many books, so many foreign languages, so many high-paid teachers, and may even suffer from exposure to so many guidance counselors. Old four-story buildings with their windows boarded, cracked or missing are on every side. “Some years ago the chancellor was caught in borrowing $100,000 from the schools. There is a computer in each class. Seeing no reference books, I ask a teacher if encyclopedias and other reference books are kept in classrooms. In six years two assistants at my school have died of cancer. Beyond the inner doors a guard is seated. Denial of “the means of competition” is perhaps the single most consistent outcome of the education offered to poor children in the schools of our large cities; and nowhere is this pattern of denial more explicit or more absolute than in the public schools of New York City. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. (Original work published 1991) U.S. Department of Education. A tiny ninth grade student seems to hesitate outside the office door. ”, At three o’clock the nurse arrives to do her record-keeping. “There are 42 students in my science class, 40 in my English class—45 in my home room. “They have exposure to whatever New York City has available. Five years later, the same facts are cited once again. They teach each other. Then he began to act. Pay college kids to tutor inner-city children. I don’t think you’d do it, pay more taxes or whatever, out of obligation. One of the students in her class, she says, wrote this two-line poem for Martin Luther King: “Frequently,” says a teacher at another crowded high school in New York, “a student may be in the wrong class for a term and never know it.” With only one counselor to 700 students system-wide in New York City, there is little help available to those who feel confused. They’re doing construction all around me so the noise is quite amazing. (Kozol from back flap of dust cover) Reading Reaction: Savage Inequalities Jonathan Kozol takes the reader on a journey to six poor urban American communities between 1988 and 1990 to examine the inequalities in their school’s facilities, resources, and teachers. I had to put a class into the library. Turning in his seat, he gestures at the street and shrugs. But, like the often costly salvage programs of teen-age remediation for the children we have first denied the opportunity for health care, then for preschool, then for equal education, these special wards for damaged infants are provisions of obligatory mercy which are needed only as a consequence of our refusal to provide initial justice.”, Health officials sometimes fend off criticism of this nature by assuring us that better facilities or more elaborate surgical procedures offered to rich patients do not necessarily pay off in every case, just as we are often told that higher funding for the schools attended by more affluent children does not necessarily imply superior education. He dismisses this abruptly. A boy named Victor, sitting at my side, whispers the words: “I know why the caged bird beats his wing.… His blood is red. In the case of New York City and particularly Riverdale, however, it takes on a special poignance. If someone grows up in the South Bronx, he’s not going to be prone to learn.” His name is Max and he has short black hair and speaks with confidence. “Big fat ugly things with hairs,” says Victor. He had no confidence in his ability. I ask the students if they can explain the reasons for the physical condition of the school. (1991). It’s not a hospital that I will use if I am given any choice. Jonathan Kozol Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools Crown Publishers, 1992 I extremely enjoyed reading Jonathan Kozol's book Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. The children’s’ narratives describe an 11 year old girl being raped, murdered, and her body being dumped between the new and old school. Questions of unfairness feel more like a geometric problem than a matter of humanity or conscience. Teen-age pregnancy, drug use and other problems still would render many families in these neighborhoods all but dysfunctional. The plan included early childhood education, higher teacher salaries, a better math and science program for the high schools, and compulsory attendance with provisions for enforcement.
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