Kozol.

12.10.08

After reading some Kozol in class I decided to study up and consult google.

Great results.

Kozol brought, and brings, public school segregation to the public, a rather embarassing paradox, in the form of some fantastic prose. I cried. Kozol delivers some very sobering material here for those of us that haven’t had to confront the jaw-dropping events that have lead to the re segregation of public schools. This isn’t news, a phenomenon that started in the late eighties, early nineties and remains a topic that not only undermines the fourteenth amendment, but shines a stunningly ironic light on the separate but equal clause.

E.G.

Even these statistics, as stark as they are, cannot begin to convey how deeply isolated children in the poorest and most segregated sections of these cities have become. In the typically colossal high schools of the Bronx, for instance, more than 90 percent of students (in most cases, more than 95 percent) are black or Hispanic. At John F. Kennedy High School in 2003, 93 percent of the enrollment of more than 4,000 students were black and Hispanic; only 3.5 percent of students at the school were white. At Harry S. Truman High School, black and Hispanic students represented 96 percent of the enrollment of 2,700 students; 2 percent were white. At Adlai Stevenson High School, which enrolls 3,400 students, blacks and Hispanics made up 97 percent of the student population; a mere eight tenths of one percent were white.

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Dear Mr. Kozol,” wrote the eight-year-old, “we do not have the things you have. You have Clean things. We do not have. You have a clean bathroom. We do not have that. You have Parks and we do not have Parks.

You have all the thing and we do not have all the thing. Can you help us?”

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Still Separate, Still Unequal:
America’s Educational Apartheid
JONATHAN KOZOL / Harper’s Magazine v.311, n.1864 1sep2005