A Conversation with Jonathan Kozol, Continued

More from my discussion with educator and activist Jonathan Kozol, who’ll be speaking on Monday, March 9, at the UW-Milwaukee Union. (For more information, go to www.unionprogramming.uwm.edu or call 229-4201.)

Kozol is dismayed by the lack of diversity in our nation’s public schools, and argues that our school districts are more segregated than they were in 1968.

Kozol: When you have intense concentrations of very low-income children, of minorities, whose parents have seldom had college education and went to city public schools, children who have had no preschool, it inevitably leads to much lower test scores than are taken for granted in suburban schools.

Principals nowadays are under the sword of state and federally mandated examinations. The tests are annoying to the suburbs but not much more than an irritation because they know their kids are going to do OK. They’re not worried about No Child Left Behind; they’re worried about whether their kids will get into University of Wisconsin or Harvard. Those are the stakes for them.

In the cities, the principals, even the best principals, are in a state of almost perpetual anxiety. As a result we have seen the narrowing of the curriculum to the subjects that will be tested. Throw out art, music, social studies, any kind of cultural richness, the delight of getting excited about wonderful children’s books. Get rid of “The Hungry Caterpillar.” Get rid of Pooh and Piglet because they won’t help them on exams.

As a result, even good principals are forcing good teachers to only teach to the test. Among other things, this drives out the best teachers. Robotic teachers don’t object. But terrific teachers, and there are a lot of them in Milwaukee, despise this regimen because they know it would be rejected out of hand in the rich districts where they grew up. As a result we now see dramatic turnover rates in urban districts. In a typical urban district a young, beautifully educated teacher comes in full of ideals and is crushed by this kind of regimen. She didn’t spend all of those years in college in order to be a drill sergeant for the state. Typically they leave within three years, and nothing is more destabilizing to a school than to have rapid turnover of teachers.

Overall it creates a climate of continual anxiety, a siege mentality. That’s why I say our urban schools are in a state of near catastrophe right now. Drop-out rates are for minority kids are devastating. Two examples: Chicago and New York. Together they educate 10% of all of the black men in America. Of the black males who enter ninth grade in those districts, only 40% at best graduate within four years. Comparable statistics for any good suburban district are about 94%, 96%. That’s a disaster in itself. We’re losing all of those kids. those are plague statistics.

Kozol has harsh criticism for the voucher school movement, which he says is the “single worst, most dangerous idea” to affect educational discourse and” a triumph of the individual self-interest over civic virtue.” He charges that voucher and charter schools are “creaming operations” that leave the most difficult kids to teach in the public schools.

Kozol: Although some of them claim to accept students of all economic levels and there’s no difference between their students and those left behind in the public school system, this is a duplicitous argument. Wealth among the poor isn’t measured by income, it’s also measured by cultural assets. Voucher schools, if not by selectivity, then by self-selectivity among the applicants, are ultimately creaming operations. They skim off the children of the most highly motivated parents, and without admitting it, the most proficient students. Those who don’t do well they can send back to the public schools. Right? But public schools can’t send their students back anywhere. They can be selective simply by not having physical infrastructure to handle special needs students. They say they don’t have enough staff, sometimes. So vouchers starve the public schools of the students we want most to serve as good peer models for classmates.

Kozol said he found it ironic that voucher advocates by and large only target poor, urban school districts, but don’t dare to introduce them to wealthy, suburban districts.

Kozol: None of the voucher advocates are targeting Brookline, Mass., or Winnetka, Ill., because they know that the parents would reject them out of hand. If vouchers are such a good idea why aren’t they trying to sell them to the kids in Winnetka and Glencoe? They couldn’t succeed. Those kids are going to go to New Trier High School [one of the best public high schools in the nation].

Kozol is also highly critical of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), saying that it doesn’t measure true success in the classroom.

Kozol: NCLB is in fact primarily a testing agenda. The strict accountability is directly tied to the numbers on a one-time examination. NCLB is built on a corporate idea, that the way you improve productivity is by introducing an explicit system of punishment or reward. It’s full of corporate language. It refers to children as the “product” of the schools. The people who support NCLB speak in business terms. A high-scoring child is a “product with value added.”

Kozol had been speaking with Obama advisers and Democratic senators about how to improve the country’s public education system.

Kozol: I had spent a great deal of time, in the months before the election, talking to one of Obama’s chief advisors, and virtually all of the Democrats on the Senate education committee. I’ve advised them not to try to “fix” NCLB but to transform it dramatically, from an instrument of threat or punishment but an instrument of reward, incentive and equity. I have also strongly [argued] that the test scores, given, for example, in third grade, measure a child’s wealth, parental education, and a child’s years in preschool far more than it measures anything that the teacher has done with them in the months before they took the exam.

What I say to [the senators] is if you want to know what works in public schools you don’t need to look to the drill-and-kill mentality fostered by former President Bush or to the teach-to-the-test emphasis which, by the way, is sending billions of dollars to the testing corporations. You don’t need to look to our hopelessly dysfunctional corporations, which are failing now. You only need to look at the best schools in America. Not the best exceptional, unusual, boutique schools in the city. But the routine, good schools that serve the mainstream of America, that serve the suburbs, that serve the middle-class and upper-class suburbs. What do they have? Number one they have higher resources. Number two they have attractive buildings which give the children a sense that we actually value them. They have rich libraries with real books and teach literacy from those books, rather than from a pit-pat reader. And those communities almost always are places where parents can buy three years of pre-K or two and a half years of pre-K.

You want to have successful urban schools, give them the same money and therefore the same class size or the same well-paid and stable faculties that are given to your own children in the schools they attend. That’s what I say to senators who send their kids to public schools. They are always some of the best public schools.

And since poor people can’t pay for pre-K, establish universal preschool in this country, starting as close a possible to birth, certainly by the age of two and a half, of the highest possible quality. Rich, exciting, beautiful preschools in which children are not drilled for exams but are given social skills and pre-literacy skills and pre-numeracy skills, so that they’re all set to go when they get to the starting line in first grade or kindergarten. That’s how to do it. What works for poor black little girls is the same thing that works for affluent little girls with pale white skin. Don’t think you can do an end run around this central issue. None of these technical tricks, these mechanistic changes, are going to have the slightest long-range effect for the vast majority of children until we address the central sin of American society, which is the perpetuation of a game that’s rigged from the time a child is born.