Michael Angelo
20120415
EHP 7600
Savage Inequalities Paper
“The Mark of the Educated Mind; or
Entertaining Savage Inequalities”
The crux of Jonathan Kozal’s Savage Inequalities relies on the acceptance of one
simple truth: that desegregation is a façade. Only after this notion is accepted as true, or at
least entertained as so, does the author’s analysis of public education in America begin to
titillate instead of irritate, or to pique instead of peeve. The author’s personal exploration
of the various inner cities and surrounding suburbs in the text, the surplus of citations, the
personal anecdotes of teachers, administrators, students and parents alike, the references
to policies in place, the analysis of industry and the environment as a part of ghetto
landscapes, the arguments linking real estate values and school exclusivity, and the
plethora of facts depicting the state of affairs today all work synergistically to make the
acceptance of Kozol’s one truth more and more apparent to even the most conservative of
readers. Further, the author’s superior application of logic and deduction in his analysis of
all this information leaves little room for retort from even the most stringent of naysayers
without their acceptance to Kozol’s one truth first. Simply stated, there is plenty of room
for debate and analysis against and for many of the variables Kozol cites in his book but the
failure of desegregation is beyond doubt.
Despite my accordance with the author on this one issue and my admiration of his
logical use of the facts to support his overall case, many of the points he details in the text
confuse correlation and coincidence with causation (does urban decay occur in the schools
first and emanate out, or are schools enveloped by urban decay as it occurs around them?),
and at different stages of the book the schools and administrators appear both heroic and
noble and conversely hellish and disgusting. Further, the author’s argument largely
presents the failure of desegregation as sustained racism – insofar as insinuating that
everyone supporting the system in place is therefore supporting racism as well.
Unfortunately for Kozal however, white guilt isn’t a crime and except for those Americans
living in Good Samaritan municipals, we have no duties to sacrifice ourselves for the
betterment of others – a point to be revisited later. For these reasons and others, I intend
to oppose many of Kozol’s points by analyzing five of the most prevalent themes from the
book, applying them to my own pre-college education experience and critiquing the
author’s depiction of them in the book. Furthermore, I’ve concluded this article with ideas
for bridging the gap between the best and worst performing schools in Detroit, irrelevant
of race.
Early Childhood Education and Parental Input
To say my elementary education was directly benefitted by early childhood
education and my parents’ involvement is an understatement of epic proportions. My mom
is a Master’s of Special Ed holder and she did plenty of homework before I was even born to
assure that my education was top-notch; and my dad is a successful entrepreneur who has
always religiously supported a hard day’s work, balanced books and salesmanship.
Together, their input helped shape me into the man I am today and the student I was when
I began school. Coupled with the Montessori school I attended for pre-school and
kindergarten, I look back on my elementary experience as akin to those Kozol finds in the
suburbs, albeit with one major difference. The advantage I started school with is easily
attributed to any one or multiple sources – socioeconomic status, educated and loving
parents, good school, etc – but the subjects from the text have had all of their inherent
advantages or disadvantages tied directly to their race.
The major flaw in Kozol’s presentation of the importance of early childhood
education and parental involvement is that it fails to objectively explore the importance of
these two variables over the importance of race in determining the success of a student. As
such, underachieving whites and upwardly mobile blacks are unsurprisingly absent from
the text and readers are instead inundated with stereotyped portrayals of impoverished,
inner-city blacks and Latinos living in polluted ghettos and fighting daily urges to drop out
to either join a gang or have a baby. His case for either proving the dominance or
subordinance of parental influence and early childhood education over or under race as a
student-success determiner is therefore moot, subjective and clouded by an impartial
sample. In essence, he’s telling readers that logic would dictate these variables are more
important than race in determining success, but to ignore this notion and revert to
stereotyped, antiquated thinking patterns.
From the text itself, in a paragraph dedicated solely to the importance of early
childhood education and parental involvement, Kozol says, “Children who have had the
benefits of preschool … are at a great advantage in achieving entrance to selective high
schools; but an even more important factor seems to be the social class and education level
of their parents. (60)” However, on the same page, Kozol lures readers away from this
assessment and instead directs the audience back to the idea that race is the source of
disadvantaged youth by saying, “The system has the surface aspects of meritocracy, but
merit in this case is predetermined by conditions that are closely tied with class and race.”
The author continues to undermine the importance of these two crucial variables
throughout the text, coming back to the idea in quoting the Chicago Tribune (79) and in
interviews with some of the student subjects from the text. In one especially poignant
example of the author’s blatant denial of the importance of ECE or parental influence he
actually talks to a student whose parents moved her from the Bronx to one of the more
prestigious suburbs and mentions that he “baits” he by asking a leading question during
their interview (128). The brazen vocabulary he chooses to describe the student – “less
refined and polished” – in addition to passively aggressively attacking her admission of
acting in self-interest, and his admission that he “reluctantly” admired this student, all
illuminate the author’s agenda of improperly dismissing other variables over race as
determiners of student success.
Banking on Dropouts
My middle school years were similar to most everybody else in America – I cared
less about school than before, I sought daily or even hourly outlets for rejection and
rebellion, and I was dead set against doing anything that could possible be misconstrued as
uncool. Even though the middle school I attended is among the highest-testing and wellfunded in the state and resembled the suburban schools mentioned in the text, all of these
variables combined left me in a position not too dissimilar to those of the inner-city middle
school students from the book that never made it to high school. In essence, I didn’t want
to be in school any more than these kids did, and I certainly entertained the thought of
dropping out – my own brother was less than a year away from actually going through with
it – so what was the driving force that kept me in school and instead pushes inner-city kids
out?
The glaring explanation is that the inner-city subjects from the text are well-adapted
to life outside the institution of education by the time they hit middle school – not causally
by the system but coincidentally to all of the other elements of their lives, as the author
alludes to but refuses to admit outright (124). The brutal logic for schools banking on
dropouts and many of the budget inequities between good and bad schools should be
pleasing for at least 49 percent of Americans (I suspect this alone is force enough to
prevent amending of the system) but also acts to reassure all American’s faith in the system
in place. Simply stated, the budget inequities are proof that our system has identified its
most valuable assets and is channeling funds into the avenues with the highest return on
investment – displaying Pareto efficiency and thus providing the customers, or American
tax-payers, with the most efficient, streamlined, quality-built, mass-produced education
their money can buy; equally providing for each American what they put into and expect
from the system. The degrees of budgetary favoritism run deep too, as the author points
out in discussing the degrees of bad schools and the students in the individual schools,
therefore we should expect to see degrees of overlap in per pupil spending between the
best-performing students in the worst schools and the worst-performing students at the
best schools, which would debase many of the budgetary submissions cited in the text
(236).
Students Seeing the Difference and Equality
My high school experience was not dissimilar from elements of either end of Kozol’s
spectrum. I was in a good school (top 15% in the state) but obviously not at the best, and it
was common practice to cast charges of elitism across Dequindre into Rochester Hills and
beyond (I went to Utica Eisenhower in Shelby), despite being elitist ourselves to the other
high schools in my district – let alone to the bottom 85% of the state. These slight
variations in spending were glaring to all of us in school; the inequities between my school
and those in Rochester or those in Detroit were abundantly clear to us at the time. Kozol
sees this as stratification, however, the experience of being lumped together with others in
my community of similar racial and socioeconomic backgrounds was largely reassuring
and comforting to me. I hated school and felt like a prisoner trapped in the institution but I
was proud to be where I was. I had done summer programs as a youth in Detroit (my mom
was a teacher in DPS), so I felt qualified to say I had some experience with the alienating
hardness of inner-city schools and kids, and I interviewed with some of the elite prep
schools like Roeper and St. Mary’s before settling on Eisenhower, so I didn’t feel excluded
or intimidated by the ivy. Eisenhower was my school of choice because that was where I
felt most surrounded by the people like me – my friends, my peers and my equals – and the
process of discovering how my school helped define my character has been enlightening,
not disparaging. Equality mattered to me then only as a mark of shame on my own
identity; I was proud of who I was and where I came from, and envying the better-off was a
disservice to myself and my parents. The process of discovering the veneer of equality,
which had begun as sporadic glimpses in elementary school years earlier, hastened during
this period too – especially when less than two weeks after graduation I left the shelter of
the white, middle-upper class bubble and traded it for the swamp and sand fleas of
USMCRD Parris Island, South Carolina. Marine Corps boot camp, I’m convinced, is maybe
the only place in the whole world where human beings are treated equally, where skin
color is irrelevant unless it’s measured in degrees of green, and where your
accomplishments, intelligence, socioeconomic status and good looks are as arbitrary as
your name, your identity and the delusion that you deserve to be treated like a human
being at all.
As to the author’s many circuitous arguments that students see the filth they’re
being educated in and therefore dropping out as a result of them living up to society’s
standards, these charges only confirm that the system coincides with their overall
environment and is not the cause of it (i.e. does urban decay start at the schools and
emanate out, or does it envelop the area of the school?). From the text, this exact issue is
raised when the author explicitly asks a teacher if the students ever comment on the
condition of their building (88). The teacher’s answer is that “They don’t say…” Despite
this negative answer (the teacher is in essence saying “no” to the question), the author and
the teacher begin to speculate what the students think about the school’s condition, and the
author – again – asks the interview subject a loaded question, luring the subject to his point
of view. “I ask her if they see it as a racial message,” the text reads right before it details the
teacher’s admission that the students feel perceived racism.
The author voices this sentiment again earlier in the text, connecting Chicago’s
dropout rates with the conditions in which the students are educated but is again further
guilty of imposing his views onto his subjects and the audience (57). The paragraph opens
with the author’s assertion (minus citations) that children don’t initially know they’re
being cheated but pick up on it by the end of third grade. He then includes and out-of-
context quote from an unnamed Chicago fourth-grade teacher that seemingly aligns with
his message: “These kids are aware of their failures. Some of them act like the game’s
already over.” Not only could this one line of dialogue be interpreted a multitude of
different ways, it raises doubt to the authenticity of the actual quote and what it was really
intended to mean, and it exemplifies the author’s habit of manipulative rhetoric – luring
subjects to sync to his platform.
The topic of equality is similarly pervasive throughout the text, and although I find
myself in accord with the authors on his assertion that equality is an issue beyond the
realm of dollar and cents, we have arrived at this position by different avenues. The author
says, “equity, after all, does not simply mean equal funding …. equal funding for unequal
needs is not equity (54),” in his analysis of the property tax system, and thus contending
that equality is measured in level of needs and not dollars. Notwithstanding the obvious
logical flaws of connecting equality to currency – inflation rates, cost of living variations,
inner and inter-school (as well as inner and inter-district) Pareto efficiency connecting the
resources students have access to and per-pupil spending all complicate this notion – and
the author’s concord that this type of reasoning is spurious, the book’s format and reliance
on the numbers as citations (Appendix) leads readers away from this logic.
The larger issue of equality existing in degrees of “need” is that it subjectifies what is
usually prescriptive. That is, the term “equality” in law and politics is largely prescriptive,
meaning that the government makes laws based on Thomas Jefferson’s eloquent principal
that “all men are created equal” but leaves the details of the “equality” for the people to
bicker over. Prescriptive equality leaves the ultimate question of, “Equal how?”
unanswered and truly unanswerable. Kozol’s need-based equality first operates on the
assumption that there is a standard to which equality is measured – there isn’t; that there is
an inherent group receiving sub-standard treatment – logically if there is no standard then
this cannot be true; and ultimately that the role of government is to correct guiding
principals of the universe. Does Kozol’s notion of need-based equality apply only to
education of American citizens, or would it also therefore be logical to say that because
human beings with inalienable rights in Japan have a need for more land and that the rest
of the world MUST open their borders to the Japanese because their need to land is as
universal as ours? How quickly would the world shut down if OPEC decided to distribute
oil percentage-equal to all of the nations of the world? Is God also responsible for settling
grievances between humans and Martians for the different quantity of diamonds and gold
our planets contain? Need-based equality in any existence, let alone education, is as
laughable as a notion this, as unpractical and as impossible too.
Irrelevant to my arguments against Kozol’s analysis of the importance of early
childhood education, parental influence, the merits of Pareto Efficiency in budgetary
decisions, dropouts as a result of students perception of society, his notion of education
equality, and his overall confusion of causation versus coincidence, I truly do appreciate
and admire his logic, conviction and point of view. Politically we clearly stand on opposite
ends of the spectrum, and I’m sure he finds my arguments as repugnant as I find his,
however, Kozol himself would be among the first people I would call if I had absolute
authority to reverse the polarities seen in the text. Whatever system he and I could cook up
together, I assume, wouldn’t be any better or worse than anything that already exists but
would almost certainly upset the system in place today.
One of the main causes for segregation and the inequities of schools, according to
Kozol, is the property tax system we use to fund our schools. Fundamentally, I hate taxes
and couldn’t agree more with the author that the property tax system should be and needs
to be either amended or eliminated altogether. My own knowledge of the different taxing
models – especially to the degrees of capital they individually raise – is certainly limited,
but exploring the different models of taxation, especially flat taxes and consumption taxes,
with my opponent would be the first step I’d take to standardize the conditions of schools.
If nothing else, especially for the benefit of inner-city schools like those in Detroit, I would
at least explore the possibility of increasing the property tax rate of abandoned properties
and vacant properties – akin to tax structure in Israel. My own addendum to this model
would be that the city would be held as liable as the citizens and businesses to pay the
increased rates for run-down properties.
Imagining that the tax restructure worked and the funds were available, I’d next
work with the author to define the minimal acceptable standards in which education can be
conducted. All schools must be located in a building, with a roof, windows, running water,
fire escape routes and protection, for example. Reliable, free, high-speed Internet would be
among my chief requirements for all American schools, and I’d petition big business from
Silicon Valley for support. Similar to how the Eisenhower Interstate System created jobs
for thousands of Americans and increased national security, a nation-wide, high-speed
Internet grid would improve national education.
The minimal standards of education, besides including the facilities, would also rely
on the creation of minimal standards of academics. By the time an American student
graduates from high school, they must be able to read, write, add and subtract, for example.
I’m sure Kozol would want to fight me on some of the minimal standards I’d expect from
American students, or on issues like whether Ebonics is acceptable in the classroom, but
the point of a minimal curriculum would be to hold the citizens to the same standard which
the government holds itself. If we, the government, must provide the citizens with a
minimal standard of facilities in education, we should then expect a minimal level of
achievement to occur in schools. Legislation like No Child Left Behind that penalize lowperforming schools but also ensure national standards on education would need to be
reworked to reward the best schools because positive reinforcement is a better motivator,
but principally would need to exist.
Redefining the mission of public education in America, with an emphasis on
advancing our species and not our economy, would be a concern I’d bring up, as would a
reemphasis on meritocracy in education. I’d also push an argument that our system would
need to create an algorithm for identifying the best and brightest minds among our youth
and sparing little expense to fuel their curiosity except when it violates the minimal
acceptable standards elsewhere. I’d furthermore raise the issue of Maslow’s Hierarchy of
Needs and table the idea that these needs must be tended to during education, and I’d
certainly entertain any ideas of either centralizing education or decentralizing it according
to states.
In summation, there’s little I wouldn’t consider if tasked with the job of fixing public
education today, and any shortcomings or missing holes in the areas I listed above are
largely due to my own meandering, unorganized thought process and the little knowledge I
have of public policy on education. Segregation and inequality were the two issues that
motivated Kozol to write Savage Inequalities but political issues aside, many of the points
he makes are really arguments for efficiency, logic and better treatment of society’s most
undesired citizens. I’m torn between pride and disgust in seeing how ethically separate our
two views differ – he is easily the better man than I – but I celebrate and cherish the system
that allows us equal voice in being heard.