Where Ghetto Schools Fail by Johnathan Kozol, 1967

The Atlantic Monthly, "Where Ghetto Schools Fail," October 1967 by Jonathan Kozol: There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are. In isolated suburban school districts children play ingenious Monopoly games revised to impart an immediate and first-person understanding of economic problems in the colonial period. In private schools, kindergarten children begin to learn about numbers with brightly colored sticks known as cuisenaire rods, and second-grade children are introduced to mathematics through the ingenuity of a package of odd-shaped figures known as Attribute Games. But in the majority of schools in Roxbury and Harlem and dozens of other slum districts stretching west across the country, teaching techniques, textbooks, and other teaching aids are hopelessly antique, largely obsolete, and often insulting or psychologically oppressive for many thousands of Negro and other minority schoolchildren.I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima; 60 percent were either ten years old or older. Of thirty-two different book series standing in rows within the cupboard, only six were published as recently as five years ago, and seven series were twenty to thirty-five years old. These figures put into perspective some of the lofty considerations and expensive research projects sponsored by even the best of the curriculum development organizations, for they suggest that educational progress and innovation are reaching chiefly the children of rich people rather than the children of the urban poor. Obsolescence, however, was not the only problem in our textbooks. Direct and indirect forms of discrimination were another. The geography book given to my pupils, first published eighteen years ago and only modestly updated since, traced a cross-country journey in which there was not one mention, hint, or image of a dark-skinned face. The chapter on the South described an idyllic landscape in the heart of Dixie: pastoral home of hardworking white citizens, contented white children, and untroubled white adults. While the history book mentioned Negroes--in its discussion of slavery and the Civil War--the tone of these sections was ambiguous. "Men treasure freedom above all else," the narrative conceded at one point, but it also pointed out that slavery was not an altogether dreadful institution: "Most Southern people treated their slaves kindly," it related, and then quoted a stereotyped plantation owner as saying: "Our slaves have good homes and plenty to eat. When they are sick, we take care of them...."

While the author favored emancipation, he found it necessary to grant to arguments on the other side a patriotic legitimacy: "No one can truly say, 'The North was right' or 'The Southern cause was better.' Remember, each side fought for the ideals it believed in. For in Our America all of us have the right to our beliefs."

When my class had progressed to the cotton chapter in our geography book, I decided to alter the scheduled reading. Since I was required to make use of the textbook, and since its use, I believed, was certain to be damaging, I decided to supply the class with extra material in the form of a mimeographed sheet. I did not propose to tell the children any tales about lynchings, beatings, or the Ku Klux Klan. I merely wanted to add to the study of cotton-growing some information about the connection between the discovery of Eli Whitney's cotton gin and the greater growth of slavery.

I had to submit this material to my immediate superior in the school, a lady whom I will call the Reading Teacher. The Reading Teacher was a well-intentioned woman who had spent several years in ghetto classrooms, but who, like many other teachers, had some curiously ambivalent attitudes toward the children she was teaching. I recall the moment after I had handed her that sheet of paper. Looking over the page, she agreed with me immediately that it was accurate. Nobody, she said, was going to quibble with the idea that cotton, the cotton gin, and slavery were all intertwined. But it was the question of the "advisability of any mention of slavery to the children at this time," which, she said, she was presently turning over in her mind. "Would it," she asked me frankly, "truly serve the advantage of the children at this stage to confuse and complicate the study of simple geography with socioeconomic factors?" Why expose the children, she was asking essentially, to unpleasant facts about their heritage?

Then, with an expression of the most honest and intense affection for the children in the class, she added: "I don't want these children to have to think back on this year later on and to remember that we were the ones who told them they were Negro." This remark seemed to take one step further the attitude of the textbook writers. Behind the statement lay the unspoken assumption that to be Negro was a shameful condition. The longer this knowledge could be kept from the innocent young, the better off they would be.

After the journey across America, the class was to study the life of the desert Arab. Before we began, the Reading Teacher urged upon me a book which she said she had used with her own classes for a great many years. It was not the same book the children had. She told me she preferred it, but that it was too old to be in regular use. I took the book home that night and opened it up to a section on the Arabs:


"The Bedouin father is tall and straight. He wears a robe that falls to his ankles and his bare feet are shod in sandals of camel's leather....Behind the Bedouin father walk his wife and his children....


These people are fine looking. Their black eyes are bright and intelligent. Their features are much like our own, and, although their skin is brown, they belong to the white race, as we do. It is scorching desert sun that has tanned the skin of the Arabs to such a dark brown color."


Turning to a section on Europe, I read the following description:


"Two Swiss children live in a farmhouse on the edge of town....These children are handsome. Their eyes are blue. Their hair is golden yellow. Their white skins are clear, and their cheeks are as red as ripe, red apples."


Curious after this to see how the African Negroes would be treated, I turned to a section on the Congo Valley:


"The black people who live on this great continent of Africa were afraid of the first white men who came to explore their land. They ran and hid from them in the dark jungle. They shot poisoned arrows from behind the thick bushes. They were savage and uncivilized....


Yumbo and Minko are a black boy and a black girl who live in this jungle village. Their skins are of so dark a color that they look almost black. Their noses are large and flat. Their lips are thick. Their eyes are black and shining, and their hair is so curly that it seems like wool. They are Negroes and belong to the black race."


Perhaps without being conscious of it, the Reading Teacher had her own way of telling the children what it meant to be Negro.

Not all books used in a school system, merely by the law of averages, are going to be consistently and blatantly poor. A large number of the books we had in Boston were only mildly distorted or else devastatingly bad only in one part. One such book, not used in my school but at the junior high level, was entitled *Our World Today*. Right and wrong, good and bad alternate in this book from sentence to sentence and from page to page:

"The people of the British Isles are, like our own, a mixed people. Their ancestors were the sturdy races of northern Europe, such as Celts, Angles, Saxons, Danes and Normans, whose energy and abilities still appear in their descendant. With such a splendid inheritance what could be more natural than that the British should explore and settle many parts of the world and in time build up the world's greatest colonial empire?...

The people of South Africa have one of the most democratic governments now in existence in any country...

Africa needs more capitalists....White managers are needed...to show the Negroes how to work and to manage their plantations....

In our study of the nations of the world, we should try to understand the people and their problems from their point of view. We ought to have a sympathetic attitude towards them, rather than condemn them through ignorance because they do not happen always to have our ways....

The Negro is very quick to imitate and follow the white man's way of living and dressing....

The white man may remain for short periods and direct the work, but he cannot...do the work himself. He must depend on the natives to do the work....

The white men who have entered Africa are teaching the natives how to live...."

Sooner or later books like these will be put to pasture. Either that, or they will be carefully doctored and rewritten. But the problem they represent is not going to be resolved in any important way by their removal or revision. Too many teachers admire and depend on such textbooks, and prefer to teach from them. The attitudes of these teachers are likely to remain long after the books have been replaced.

Plenty of good books are available, of course, that give an honest picture of the lives of black Americans. The tutorial programs in Boston have been using them, and so have many of the more enlightened private schools. In the public schools of this city, however, it is difficult to make use of books that depart from the prescribed curriculum. When I made a tentative effort to introduce such materials into my classroom, I encountered firm resistance.

Earlier in the year I had brought to school a book of poetry by the Negro author Langston Hughes. I had not used it in the classroom, but it did at least make its way onto a display board in the auditorium as part of an exhibit on important American Negroes, set up to pay lip service to "Negro History Week."

To put a book by a Negro poet on display is one thing. To open the book and attempt to read something from it is quite another. In the last weeks of the spring I discovered the difference when I began to read a few of the poems to the children in my class. It was during a period in which I also was reading them some poems of John Crowe Ransom, Robert Frost, and W. B. Yeats.

Hughes, I have come to learn, holds an extraordinary appeal for many children. I knew this from some earlier experiences in other classes, and I remembered, in particular, the reaction of a group of young teen-agers in a junior high the first time I ever had brought his work into a public school. On the book's cover, the children could see the picture of the dark-skinned author, and they did not fail to comment. Their comments concentrated on that single, obvious, overriding fact:

"Look--that man's colored."

The same reaction was evident here, too, among my fourth-grade students: the same gratification and the same very vivid sense of recognition. It seemed a revelation to them that a man could have black skin and be a famous author.

Of all the poems of Langston Hughes that we read, the one the children liked the best was a poem entitled "Ballad of the Landlord." The reason, I think, that this piece of writing had so much meaning for them was not only that it seemed moving in an obvious and immediate human way, but also that it found its emotion in something ordinary. It is a poem which allows both heroism and pathos to poor people, sees strength in awkwardness, and attributes to a poor person standing on the stoop of his slum house every bit as much significance as William Wordsworth saw in daffodils, waterfalls, and clouds. At the request of the children, I mimeographed some copies of that poem, and although nobody in the classroom was asked to do this, several of the children took it home and memorized it on their own. I did not assign it for memory, because I do not think that memorizing a poem has any special value. Some of the children just came in and asked if they could recite it. Before long, almost every child in the room had asked to have a turn.

One day a week later, shortly before lunchtime, I was standing in front of my class playing a record of French children's songs I had brought in. A message-signal on the wall began to buzz. I left the room and hurried to the principal's office. A white man whom I had never seen before was sitting by her desk. This man, bristling and clearly hostile to me, as was the principal, instantly attacked me for having read to my class and distributed at their wish the poem entitled "Ballad of the Landlord." It turned out that he was the father of one of the few white boys in the class. He was also a police officer.

The mimeograph of the poem, in my handwriting, was waved before my eyes. The principal demanded to know what right I had to allow such a poem--not in the official course of study--to be read and memorized by children. I said I had not asked anyone to memorize it, but that I would defend the poem and its use on the basis that it was a good poem. The principal became incensed with my answer and blurted out that she did not consider it a work of art.

The parent was angry as well, it turned out, about a book having to do with the United Nations. I had brought a book to class, one of sixty or more volumes, that told about the UN and its Human Rights Commission. The man, I believe, had mistaken "human rights" for "civil rights" and was consequently in a patriotic rage. The principal, in fairness, made the point that she did not think there was anything wrong with the United Nations, although in the report later filed on the matter, she denied this, and said, instead, "I then spoke and said that I felt there was no need for this material in the classroom." The principal's report went on to say that she assured the parent, after I had left the room, that "there was not another teacher in the district who would have used this poem or any material like it. I assured him that his children would be very safe from such incidents."

I returned to my class, as requested, and a little before two o'clock the principal called me back to tell me I was fired. She forbade me to say good-bye to the children in the class or to indicate in any way that I was leaving. She said that I was to close up my records, leave the school, and report to School Department headquarters the next morning.

The next day an official who had charge of my case at the School Department took a much harder line on curriculum innovation than I had ever heard before. No literature, she said, which is not in the course of study could *ever* be read by a Boston teacher without permission of someone higher up. She said further that no poem by any Negro author could be considered permissible if it involved suffering. I asked her whether there would be many good poems left to read by such a standard. Wouldn't it rule out almost all great Negro literature? Her answer evaded the issue. No poetry that described suffering was felt to be suitable. The only Negro poetry that could be read in the Boston schools, she indicated, must fit a certain kind of standard. The kind of poem she meant, she said by way of example might be a poem that accentuates the positive or "describes nature" or "tells of something hopeful."

The same official went on a few minutes later to tell me that any complaint from a parent meant automatic dismissal. "You're out," she said. "You cannot teach in the Boston schools again. If you want to teach, why don't you try a private school someday?"

Other Boston officials backed up these assertions in statements released during the following hectic days. The deputy superintendent, who wielded considerable authority over these matters, pointed out that although Langston Hughes "has written much beautiful poetry, we cannot give directives to the teacher to use literature written in native dialects." She explained: "We are trying to break the speech patterns of these children, trying to get them to speak properly. This poem does not present correct grammatical expression and would just entrench the speech patterns we want to break."

A couple of weeks later, winding up an investigation into the matter, School Committee member Thomas Eisenstadt concluded that school officials had handled things correctly. Explaining in his statement that teachers are dismissed frequently when found lacking in either "training, personality or character," he went on to say that "Mr. Kozol, or anyone else who lacks the personal discipline to abide by rules and regulations, as we all must in our civilized society, is obviously unsuited for the highly responsible profession of teaching."

In thinking back upon my year within the Boston system, I am often reminded of a kind of sad-keyed epilogue that the Reading Teacher used to bring forward sometimes at the end of a discussion: "Things are changing," she used to say with feeling; "I am changing too--but everything cannot happen just like that."

Perhaps by the time another, generation comes around a certain modest number of these things will have begun to be corrected. But if I were the parent of a Negro child, I know that I would not willingly accept a calendar of improvements scaled so slowly. The anger of the mother whose child's years in elementary school have been squandered may seem inexplicable to a person like the Reading Teacher. To that mother, it is the complacency and hypocrisy of a society that could sustain and foster so many thousands of people like the Reading Teacher that seem extraordinary. The comfortable people who don't know and don't see the ghettos deliberate in their committee rooms. Meanwhile, the children whose lives their decisions are either going to save or ruin are expected to sit quietly, fold their hands patiently, recite their lessons, draw their margins, bite their tongues, swallow their dignities, and smile and wait.

American Apartheid Education

From the Nation Magazine Johnathan Kozol's "Overcoming Apartheid,"

Little Rock 1957

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States. Hypersegregated inner-city schools--in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000--are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

"At the beginning of the twenty-first century," according to Gary Orfield and his colleagues at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, "American public schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous resegregation. The desegregation of black students, which increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has receded to levels not seen in three decades." The proportion of black students in majority-white schools stands at "a level lower than in any year since 1968." The four most segregated states for black students, according to a recent study by the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois and California. In New York, only one black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.

The fashionable reflex nowadays is to declare that integration "failed" and to settle instead, in Orfield's words, for better ways of "doing Plessy" in the urban schools as they now stand. Such declarations of futility ignore the reality that as many as 10 million black, white and Hispanic children have attended school together in interdistrict programs in which integrated schooling has become a fact of life for an entire generation of black children. In large numbers, the inner-city students in these programs have gone on to universities and colleges and become civic leaders in their own communities.

In the Milwaukee area, for instance, twenty-two suburban districts currently participate in a student-transfer program to promote school integration across district lines, which has been in operation now for nearly thirty years. Under the program four thousand students transfer between Milwaukee and its suburbs. In the middle-class suburb of Shorewood, for example, 11 percent of the student population comes into the district from Milwaukee. Including minority children who already live in Shorewood, says Jack Linehan, the recently retired superintendent, "our school district is about 19 percent black and Hispanic, and the community has a great comfort level with that.... I think parents got to know each other as friends.... I think that evaporated away a lot of the psychological resistance." Linehan also notes that starting integration in the elementary grades made it much easier for children "simply to be children with each other." Stereotypes fall away, he adds. "It's more difficult to conjure up 'the other' when you're building sand castles together."

In St. Louis also, a suburban-urban interdistrict transfer program has been in place for more than twenty years. The program, initiated under a court order in 1983, today enrolls about 10,000 children from the city, who represent nearly a quarter of the school-age population of black children in St. Louis, while about 500 children from the suburbs make the opposite commute. Although recent cutbacks in the funds provided by the state to underwrite these transfers have imposed a heavier financial burden on the sixteen districts that participate, most of the education leaders there have made clear their preference to continue with the program even in the face of opposition from the state.

In the Louisville area as well, school integration, initially carried out under court order, has now been in place without court order for a quarter-century. The sweep of the program, under which the city schools and county schools have been combined into a single system in which more than 90,000 black, Hispanic, white and Asian children are enrolled, has had the effect of rendering Kentucky's public schools the most desegregated in the nation. The typical black student in Kentucky now attends a school in which two-thirds of the enrollment is Caucasian.

When a proposal was made in 1991 to terminate or cut back on Kentucky's integration program, protests were voiced by community groups, the teachers union, the local press, the Jefferson County Human Relations Commission and the regional branch of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. A survey revealed that the number of black parents who believed their children's education had improved under the busing plan exceeded those who took the opposite position by a ratio of six to one. Less than 2 percent believed that education for their children would be better in resegregated schools. Despite occasional recurrences of opposition from groups or individuals who represent small pockets of resistance, support for school desegregation in the Louisville community continues strong and unabated to the present day.

Public policy has largely turned its back on the aspirations embodied by these instances of school desegregation. "Even many black leaders," notes education analyst Richard Rothstein, are weary of the struggle over mandatory busing programs to achieve desegregation and "have given up on integration," arguing, in his words, that "a black child does not need white classmates in order to learn." So education policies, he says, "now aim to raise scores in [the] schools that black children attend." "That effort," he writes, "will be flawed even if it succeeds." The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, he reminds us, "was not about raising scores" for children of minorities "but about giving black children access to majority culture, so they could negotiate it more confidently.... For African-Americans to have equal opportunity, higher test scores will not suffice. It is foolhardy to think black children can be taught, no matter how well, in isolation and then have the skills and confidence as adults to succeed in a white world where they have no experience."

Nonetheless, programs that promote school integration continue to be threatened in some sections of the nation. In Milwaukee, for example, legislation has been introduced three times since 1999 to do away with or substantially reduce interdistrict transfers. Much of the pressure has come from those who argue that the money spent for integrated education should be spent instead to upgrade schools within the city, the assumption being that the state cannot afford to make both of these purposes attainable. In the first two attempts, the legislation was defeated. When on the third attempt, in 2003, the legislation was approved, it was vetoed by Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle.

There will be further legislative efforts like these in the future, says Jack Linehan, the former Shorewood superintendent--this, he notes, despite academic outcomes for the students in the transfer program that are consistently far better than those of students who remain in Milwaukee. The four-year graduation rate of inner-city students who have been attending school in the suburban districts is typically 95 percent or higher, Linehan observes, while the rate for students in Milwaukee's schools averages below 60 percent. If the legislature should succeed in cutting funding for the interdistrict plan, says Linehan, suburban districts would be forced to raise their local levies up to 25 percent to keep on with the program. "The only other option is to send these children back, which I believe would be immoral. We cannot say, 'We didn't mean it, now there's no more money.'"

In perhaps the most disheartening development, the interdistrict program in St. Louis is facing the risk of termination in the next three years. A court-supervised phaseout of state funding for the program, while it does not prohibit integration, significantly discourages suburban districts from accepting students from St. Louis after the 2008-09 academic year. The suburbs, for the most part, have wanted to continue; indeed, students in the affluent community of Clayton walked out of classes in 2004 to protest a possible withdrawal from the program, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The principal of Clayton High School told the paper he was "proud to be part of a community that values diversity in a metro area so segregated." But the state, beginning in late 2004, cut assistance to the district from the full per-pupil cost in excess of $13,000 to approximately half that sum, a loss in funding that has led the Clayton School Board, against the wishes of its students, to vote to terminate the program and accept no further applicants after 2008.

Other St. Louis suburbs may be driven to the same decision. Already, as a result of the first stages of the phaseout, the number of city students going to suburban schools has dropped by about 3,000 from a peak of 13,000 in the 1990s, while the number of suburban children going to St. Louis schools has dropped to half the number who were making this commute during the 1990s. "The state government," Orfield notes, "beginning under former Governor John Ashcroft, has fiercely opposed the integration program. It works, so it will be killed, unlike charter schools, which do not work and will be expanded." As in Milwaukee, the success of students in the program has been documented thoroughly. Ninety percent of transfer students graduating from suburban high schools have pursued postsecondary education, most attending two- or four-year colleges, compared with only 47 percent of graduating minority seniors in St. Louis. And the volume of applications by minority parents to enroll their children in the program has continued to be strong and is, indeed, increasing. In 2004 nearly 6,000 parents submitted applications for the 1,300 openings that were available.

Is it accurate then to say that most Americans, and black Americans especially, as we are told so frequently, have decided to give up on integrated education? National surveys, Orfield notes, do not bear this out. More than two-thirds of Americans believe "desegregation improves education for blacks," and "a growing population is convinced" it has a positive effect for whites as well. In surveys among young adults, 60 percent believe the federal government ought to make sure that public schools are integrated. The same percentage of black respondents do not merely favor integrated education but believe that it is "absolutely essential" that the population of a school be racially diverse. (Only 8 percent of blacks and only 20 percent of whites say this is not of much importance.) Opposition to desegregation among whites, Orfield pointedly observes, is highest among those who have no experience of integration. Yes, as those who have participated in these programs rightly note, there are the multitude of challenges that transfer students often do confront; and these are not always minor problems, nor are they exclusively, as some may think, "the problems they bring with them." Many are created by insensitivity or insufficient care in prior planning on the part of the receiving districts, others by resilient racist suppositions on the part of educators or administrators even in some of the most self-consciously progressive white communities.

Still, oral histories of students who experience desegregation usually reveal that even when the social adaptations may be difficult at first, the students consider the benefits they ultimately gain to be well worth the challenges they've faced. And despite the social tensions students in these interdistrict programs do sometimes encounter--and despite those famous "separate tables" in the cafeterias to which black students often gravitate, and in regard to which an awful lot of lamentation is devoted in the press--many of the white and nonwhite students get to know each other far too well not to be drawn to one another, finally, as friends.

Most parents of black and Hispanic students who have asked for my advice when they were trying to decide upon a school their children might attend have told me they have rarely thought about the pros and cons of trying to enroll their children in suburban schools or, indeed, in racially desegregated schools within their district, because they do not believe it possible that they would have the chance to exercise this option if they wanted to. Orfield believes that we can make it possible on a far broader scale and that we have, in any case, a moral obligation to devote ourselves to heightening that possibility in any way we can.

In answer to those who say they share this goal but point to the obstacles presented by the current makeup of the federal courts and the lack of any apparent interest in advancing such a purpose on the part of national elected leaders or the leaders of state government, Orfield, a political scientist by training, gives a clear, unshakable response. "The notion that apartheid in the South could be dismantled 50 years ago seemed wildly improbable as well," he noted. "Breaking down the barriers to interdistrict integration and reducing residential segregation in the suburbs have at least as good a chance of ultimate success. It will take a major political thrust in order to achieve this. We will certainly need some better people on the courts. But look at what Charles Hamilton Houston and W.E.B. Du Bois and those who worked with them during the decades long before the Brown decision faced when they were looking at a system of apartheid in the South which nobody was seriously resisting and which neither political party was opposing. And they nonetheless were asking, 'How do you take this thing apart?' And they did it. They started a movement. They created the intellectual force to make it possible. This is what we need to do as well."

And, he said, with a determination that is seldom heard within the discourse of too many tired-sounding liberals these days, "When we do create that force, it will be successful also."

(source: The Nation)

Jonathan Kozol: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America