CONSTRICTED TERRAIN: JONATHAN KOZOL, THE LEFT, AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM

Robert Lowe National-Louis University

Harvey Kantor Department of Educational Studies

University of Utah

Jonathan Kozol’s Death a t an Early Age was one of several powerful critiques of public schools written in the 1960s.’ KOZO~, Herbert Kohl, George Dennison, James Herndon, and others were uncompromising in their depiction of how schools devastated the lives of African American children. Obtuse educational bureaucracies and unenlightened curricula were partly responsible, but the crimes schools com- mitted were not merely faceless; these writers implicated teachers and principals in racist behavior too.

There certainly is some irony in the fact that these books, which suggested the impossibility of reforming public schools, encouraged many idealistic young people to enlist in efforts to make education serve ends of racial justice. Some heeded the message of injustice but disregarded the message of intractability and went to work in public schools. Others, ourselves included, choose to work elsewhere in education - in alternative schools and Black Colleges.

Though drawn to education as a vocation, many of these new recruits believed that even their best efforts could make only a marginal difference in students’ lives unless the dominant societal relations were transformed as well. Kozol’s subsequent writing on education reinforced this attitude. In The Night Is Dark and IAm Farfrom Home, he maintained that the teacher who engaged in liberatory practice would face almost certain termination.2 Such activity was not futile, however, because it illuminated the unjust ways schools operated, and, Kozol seemed to suggest, could help build a movement outside of schools that would create a new society.

Kozol’s newest book, SavageInequalities, evokes his earlier workin its eloquent concern with the ways schools perpetrate racial inju~tice.~ There is the undiminished evocative power of Death at An Early Age, as Kozol listens closely to the voices of children in six school districts and writes of the ways urban schools violate their innocence, brightness, and capability. There is also the brilliant way he probes the ethical abdication of the affluent, a theme he earlier took up in The Night Is Dark.

1. Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 19671. 2. Jonathan Kozol, The Night i s Dark and IAm Far From Home (Toronto: Bantam, 1977). 3. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Crown, 1991).

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But there are crucial differences as well. Death at an Early Age emphasizes the bureaucratic ineptitude of urban schools and the racist practices of teachers, administrators, and school board officials. The Night Is Dark views schools as fundamental to the creation of the sense of ethical immunity that allows the well- to-do to disavow responsibility for other people’s children. Taken together, Kozol argued in these books that schools were failing children as they succeeded in doing their appointed job of deforming the spirits of the poor and soothing the consciences of the rich. In contrast, Savage Inequalities views unequal resources as the para- mount problem of public schools and appeals to the sense of fairness among the privileged to change the way schools are funded.

Kozol obviously is not now so naive as to think that all teachers and administra- tors are innocent of racist behavior, that elaborate bureaucracies do not stultify, or that tracking and standardized testing do not harm. Yet in relegating to the background his critique of the way schools are organized and underplaying the connection between school organization and the organization of society, his empha- sis on resource disparities suggests uncritical support of public education as a public good that is unequally distributed rather than a necessary agent of an unjust social order that constitutes a “non optional realm of childhood ind~ctrination.”~

What is remarkable about this transformation is that Kozol still manages to stake out a position on the left. Although Savage Inequalities does not emphasize how the organization of schooling reproduces the inequities in society at large, it nevertheless makes clear how the broader social and economic context continues to compromise the democratic promise of public education. By contrast, many other left educational scholars who previously had been attentive to the reproductive role of schooling no longer talk much about the social and economic conditions or the institutional constraints that make equal educational opportunity difficult to secure. Ignoring how concentrated poverty, racism, and fiscal crisis have combined to impede reform in urban schools, they blithely underscore the democratic possi- bilities they believe inhere in public education.

For the left in the 1960s it was easy to focus on the repressive activities of the schools and other state institutions as well as the inadequacy of the state’s redistribu- tive measures because there was optimism that the entire social order could be transformed. Now in an era when cuts in federal funding for social programs, diminished corporate regulation, dramatically reduced taxation of the wealthy, and a powerfully resuscitated ideology of individualism have eroded support for public institutions and significantly weakened the redistributive capabilities of the state,

4. Kozol, The Night is Dark, 4.

ROBERT LOWE is Assistant Professor at National-Louis University. Correspondence should be addressed to himat3037N. Farwell,Milwaukee, WI 5321 1. Hisprimaryareaof scholarshipis thehistory of education.

HARVEY KANTOR is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University cif

Utah, 308 MBH, Salt Lake City, UT 841 12. His primary area of scholarship is the history of education and social policy.

LOWE AND KANTOR Constricted Terrain 13

progressives wish to preserve the public sphere and see public schools as central to this effort. Conservative victories, however, have sharply circumscribed the dis- course of the left by shifting the terrain of educational debate away from a strong concern with eq~al i ty .~ In contrast to twenty years ago, many on the left today look toward a more just meritocratic order rather than to a less hierarchical one.6

Such pinched optimism comes forth clearly in the left response to educational “choice.” Although public education has continued to be a disaster for children of color particularly, progressive educators, ourselves included, affirm the importance of preserving public schools in the face of schemes that would permit public funding of private schools.’ In doing so, however, many progressive educators have been seduced by the word “choice” and uphold parents’ right to choose within the public arena as an important lever of school improvement.* In embracing “choice” they skirt Kozol’s observation that the few well-funded urban schools typically are “chosen” by the children of the privileged at the cost of diminished resources for everyone else. Even a choice program that demanded equalized resources for schools within urban districts would mean choosing between schools that are equally impoverished.

As weak an instrument of educational reform as ’‘choice’’ is, it is popular in part because school districts are capable of implementing it. Reforms that truly expand opportunity for all are far more elusive since federal policies and judicial decisions have long supported middle-class whites in their choice of schools while limiting opportunities for inner-city residents. Since World War ll federal housing and tax policies have catered to whites’ desire for segregated suburbs at the expense of urban communities where most low-income people of color send their children to school.Y In addition, the Supreme Court in the early 1970s essentially ruled out mandatory interdistrict desegregation and stymied most efforts to equalize expenditures be- tween urban and suburban school districts. Indeed, by encouraging white suburbanization and affirming the sanctity of local political boundaries while discriminating against people of color, federal policies impoverished urban schools and freed middle class suburbanites from any economic responsibility for them. Yet with their high property values wealthy suburbs can raise more for their schools with a lower tax rate than cities whose hgher tax rate but deteriorating economic base yields inadequate per pupil expenditures.l0

5 . Michael Apple, “Redefining Equality: Authoritarian Populism and the Conservative Restoration,” Teachers College Record 90 (Winter 1988). 6. See, for instance, Colin Greer, “Why Private School Choice is Not the Answer,” in We Still Need Public Schools, ed. Art Must, Jr. (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1992).

7. Robert Lowe, “Choosing Inequality in the Schools,” Monthly Review 44 [May 1992). 8. For example, see Deborah W. Meier, “Choice Can Save Public Education,” The Nation, 4 March 1991; Michelle Fine, “Democratizing Choice: Reinventing Public Education,” in Choice: What Rolein American Education! A symposium sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, 1992.

9. Kenneth T. rackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization ofthe United States [New York Oxford University Press, 19851, chap. 11.

10. Alan Ornstein, “Redefining the Urban Problem,” Phi Delta Kappan 63 (April 1982).

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Of course not every suburban school system is lavishly funded. Nor are the educational problems facing poor and working class students in big city schools due entirely to inadequate resources. Racism and class bias, inept teaching, and low expectations for success also contribute to the educational obstacles that low- income and minority children in inner-city schools must overcome. But the policies and practices characteristic of inner-city schools are often closely linked to their lack of resources. In several city school systems with large numbers of African American and Latino students, school officials told Kozol that they actually count on pupils dropping out, since they have nowhere to put them and too few teachers to teach them if they did not leave.

Given the narrowing discourse on education and the diminished commitment of the affluent to the ideal of common schooling for all, Kozol’s brief for equitable funding in Savage Inequalities could not be more radical without losing most of his readership. His book dramatically parts company with so many other recent best- sellers in education like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education, and John Chubb and Terry Moe’s Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools that nurture elitism and selfishness.” His call for transfer payments in hard cash also goes well beyond the insubstantial language of possibility that many progressive educators prefer to invoke.

Yet, to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, Kozol’s optimism is more of the will than the intellect. He recognizes that young people who might have been drawn into the movement in the 1960s respond to his notion of redstribution of resources with the question, “What‘s in it for me?” He has found, as we have in our classes, people moved by his writing who somehow still think money is irrelevant to reform. He recognizes the powerful class interest served by relegating the children of the poor to schools that guarantee they will never be able to compete with the children of the affluent.

Still, Kozol’s eloquent appeal to fairness may at times jog dormant consciences. Furthermore, his demand for greater resources in poor districts should shape the agenda of reform-minded activists since adequate funding is a pre-condition for the success of various school-based reforms, from restructuring governance, to multiculturalism, to cooperative learning. Moreover, his steadfast focus on equity sets a standard against which these and other reform efforts ought to be measured. In other words, to what extent do they nourish equality rather than merely address technical questions of efficiency and productivity? Finally, if schools continue to reproduce the inequities of thelarger society, Kozol’s appeal may someday encourage more people to consider what kind of society will support state institutions designed to release the capacities of all.

11. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York The Free Press, 1991); and John Chubb and Terry Moe, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools [Washington: The Brookings Institution, 19901.