Calling for a renewed push to end segregated education, with many children of color trapped in crumbling inner-city schools, author and activist Jonathan Kozol delivered a blistering critique of American public education policies to hundreds of people gathered Sept. 23 for the 2008-09 Common Reading Lecture at Elon University.
Kozol authored the 2005 bestseller The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, which serves this year as Elon’s Common Reading selection. His lecture was preceded by a question-and-answer period in Whitley Auditorium earlier in the day.
Kozol spoke at length about many of the topics he discusses in the book: disparities in the way inner city minority children are taught as opposed to their white counterparts in affluent suburban schools, the dangers of the No Child Left Behind law, and the joys of working with young children.
He offered nothing but praise for teachers themselves and almost nothing but criticism for the corporate approach to public education in inner city schools that government officials advocate today.
He cited his most recent work, Letters to a Young Teacher, in which he corresponded for a year with a first-year, first grade teacher he calls “Francesca.” Kozol has written other books such as Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation.
“Good teachers like Francesca, especially teachers of young people, are not – and should refuse – to be drill sergeants of the state or servants of global corporations,” Kozol said. “Very few of the people in the U.S. Department of Education would ever survive as first grade teachers because children wouldn’t stand them. They are mean and stiff and gloomy.”
Kozol shared with the audience of several hundred that he almost canceled the trip to Elon after his father died three weeks ago. The grief, he said toward the end of the night, is still strong.
The longtime activist, wearing simple canvas sneakers with rolled-up sleeves on his blue dress shirt, delivered his talk similar to how the late Fred Rogers, who hosted Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for decades on public television, spoke to audiences.
And Kozol was unabashedly critical of federal bureaucrats who have never stepped foot in a classroom but decide policies that affect the way millions of children learn. He told the audience that in a recent conversation with Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, a sponsor of No Child Left Behind, the senator promised him that the law would not be reauthorized.
That, Kozol said, is a good thing. He told the audience that No Child Left Behind places too much emphasis on punishing schools for not meeting arbitrary standards, while at the same time, it offers no funding for the thousands of school districts that must comply with testing requirements.
In many school systems, he said, principals have eliminated recess so that teachers can have more time to prepare their students for the mandated annual exams.
“I don’t believe (No Child Left Behind) can be fixed,” Kozol said. “I believe it needs to be repealed. Abolished. Eradicated.”
After graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English from Harvard in 1958, Kozol accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. He moved to Paris before completing his graduate studies, choosing instead to write a novel. He returned to the United States four years later and would soon teach in the Boston Public Schools.
Kozol has described often in his books how he was fired before long for reading a Langston Hughes poem to his fourth grade class, which led him to write Death at an Early Age that same year.
In recent years, Kozol has lobbied leaders in Washington to repeal several aspects to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which he harshly criticizes for how it punishes inner city school children and leads to a drop in the quality of classroom instruction.