Jonathan Kozol joined the Appleseed Network on April 9, 2024, for a Zoom discussion about Mr. Kozol’s newest book, “An End to Inequality,” which explores the deep-seated issues of racial inequality and persistent segregation in our public schools.
Here is a transcript of that discussion, edited for length and clarity:
Nyah Berg, Executive Director for New York Appleseed: You are, among many other honors, a former fourth grade teacher, a Rhodes Scholar, a longtime educator, and influential author. As you can see in the Zoom chat, folks are talking about all of your books that have inspired them on their career path. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Jonathan Kozol: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be with you tonight.
Nyah: I’m going to dive right in. What motivated you to become a teacher in the segregated school that you described in your first book, Death at an Early Age, and how did that experience lead you to become a lifelong activist for school integration?
Jonathan: Well, after college, I went to Oxford, and then actually I found Oxford boring, so I moved to Paris, and I studied writing with older writers. Then I came back to the United States, and planned to go back to Harvard, forgive me, and I wanted to become an English professor. I was really interested in Elizabethan poetry.
I’d sort of been protected from the news about civil rights uprisings while I was in Europe, and suddenly now, for the first time, I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and it just had a stunning effect on me.
And then it was the late spring, the early summer of ‘64, three young civil rights workers who were about my age went down to Mississippi where they could work on registering Black folks to vote. And they disappeared one night. They’d been murdered by the Klan. Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. I knew Schwerner’s family. And I remember I was thinking, What am I doing hanging out in Cambridge, talking about metaphysical poetry when so many others of my age are actually risking their lives to do something decent?
So I just got in a little car in Harvard Square, and I drove across town to the Black community. And I asked a Black minister – he was kind of Dr. King’s representative in Boston – I asked him, May I be of any use? Just like that. And he said, Yes, you can, young man. You’ve had a very privileged education. I’d like to see you share it with our children.
So I became a fourth grade teacher in a segregated school. And I won’t go into detail except to say that it was a horror show. It was a terrible place. There was absolutely no Black literature in the curriculum at any point. So, late in the year, I brought in a copy of Langston Hughes poems. And I read just one of his poems to my fourth graders, to which they reacted electrically. And one of them asked if she could bring the book home and show it to her mom. But the next day, I was fired. Fired because according to the Boston schools Langston Hughes wrote in, quote, ‘Black dialect.’
But that wasn’t the end of the story. That was the beginning for me because the parents of my students were outraged, partly out of loyalty to me but mostly because of Langston Hughes. They staged a sit-in at the school, and we went on the next year to start a freedom school together, in which the mothers of my students were in charge, and I was there as a head teacher. That group of parents became one of the core groups in the fight for integration in Boston. That was the event that politicized me, and I’ve really never turned back.
Nyah: It’s a beautiful origin story, and you’re making me reflect back on some of those historical photos where you see Black women making these signs for school integration, to push for it in their own schools and communities – and how much freedom schools were about giving back what they needed and deserved in their community.
An End to Inequality is your 13th book on race and education. Could you summarize the essence of the book, and why you felt obligated to write this?
Jonathan: The new book directly confronts what I call the seemingly endless segregation of the American public schools, but then it goes beyond that to confront what I call the disparate agenda, which has been put in place to target children of color in those segregated schools. It’s almost as if they are seen as a different species from white children in America, as if they’re lacking something essential, as if they’re defective little people. And, since they ‘can’t learn in normal ways,’ as we’re told, they need this unceasing and highly punitive form of discipline. They also are discouraged from speaking out in class if they suddenly have an impulsive thought that matters to them but that may interrupt the pacing of the teacher. So the unique little qualities are amputated.
The code of discipline in many of these schools, not all but in many of them, is just draconian. I walked into one segregated school in Boston where there was a coat closet in the hallway that was empty. I asked, What is that? And they said, Oh, that’s the ‘calm down room.’ It was a little teeny storage closet. And I said, What does that mean? And they said, Well, that’s the lockdown room, to be honest, where we put a child who’s interrupting the lesson.
Corporal punishment is still allowed and very common in approximately half the states, and it’s not just something like a little mild tap on the shoulder. And then the ultimate form of draconian punishment is the fact that so many young children are arrested in school. They’ll call in the police for something that a good student counselor could have handled nicely. Instead, they call in the police. A police office, in one case I describe in the book, puts plastic cuffs on a six-year-old and drags her, literally drags her physically out of the school, tosses her into the police car, brings her to a detention center where they take a mug shot of the child. And is there any racial edge to this? Definitely. Black girls, for example, are almost four times as likely as white girls to be subjected to arrest within their schools.
That’s kind of the essence of the book. And we can get into this later, but I then describe instances where suburban districts, such as the districts that surround Boston, have established powerful and carefully curated integration systems with the children from the city.
Nyah: When I was reading through this latest book, I kept having to refer back to the dates you had listed for some of these atrocious acts and, really, cruelty towards children. It was 2018, 2019, and I thought, He’s not quoting from his first book; these are happening now in real time. I think it goes to show the lack of progress since Brown v Board.
You talk about the sort of controlling of children, almost a straitjacket way of schooling. There have been a lot of cycles of highly publicized reforms within separate and unequal schools over the course of your career. You’ve noted in your book that these reforms are still being reproduced and rebranded. These reforms come and go.
Jonathan: I mean, they don’t last for long, usually. And I’m not just talking about 50, 60 years ago. Over the past 25 years, there have been about five, maybe as many as ten cycles of reform, and each one is highly publicized, and the media, even the best, tend to celebrate each reform as though this is the answer: ‘Yeah, no need to worry about something messy like desegregation. No need to confront the bankers and the brokers with their parsimonious funding. Just do this one new thing.’
The idea is somehow, each time, that with the right reform, separate need not be unequal.
I call it the search for perfectible apartheid. But apartheid cannot be perfected. It didn’t work, none of this worked. The race gap hasn’t diminished in the least during this period.
One of my favorite writers on education is Nikole Hannah-Jones. She was asked once by an interviewer, Have you seen some of these reforms in action? And she said (I’m paraphrasing her), Yes, the principal is always telling me, we’re about to do this, and this is going to fix it.
So the interviewer said, Well, then what does work?
And she answered in one word: Integration.
Nyah: NiKole Hannah-Jones also had another article about her daughter in elementary schools in New York, which really inspired a lot of the work for New York Appleseed, knowing school integration is one of the few proven reforms to really make a difference in closing the opportunity gap.
At the same time, we get some pushback from communities of color on the worthiness of pursuing school integration. There’s a recall back to the trauma of the desegregation efforts in the 50s and 60s. Rocks being thrown at their buses. And there’s a hesitancy to pursue some of these efforts. How have you approached addressing these concerns?
Jonathan: In the Boston area there’s a spectacular, successful urban-suburban busing program called METCO, and it typically includes about 3,300 mostly Black and Latino children from Boston who ride the bus every day to schools in about 40 suburbs. There’s almost always a waiting list of thousands more students who can’t get in solely because the state is too parsimonious to provide the funding it would take.
I’ve heard all sorts of cliches. There’s a whole bunch of clay pigeons to knock down. One of them is that Black children are not going to suddenly become smarter just because they’re sitting next to white children. Well, nobody ever argued that in the first place.
They say the children are going to lose their cultural identity, but in the very sensitively developed METCO program here in the Boston area, there’s tremendous emphasis on not just defending the identity of the Black and Latino kids, but making a virtue of their identity. Should I tell you a bit about METCO?
Nyah: I’d love hear about how the METCO program came to be, and also a little bit more on how you define it as successful – What you mean by METCO being successful?
Jonathan: I take a personal stake in METCO because I was in it as a teacher. It’s now in its nearly 60th year and I was in it from the very start. After I was fired from Boston, as I said, a group of us, including a number of mothers of my students, organized a highly political freedom school. But then a moment came when the parents just decided they were never going to obtain anything like integration or first-class education in the Boston schools. So they looked out to the suburbs.
It’s interesting, several of the suburban superintendents not only cooperated with them, but became activists for the program because they thought it would be good for their students not to grow up in a world that doesn’t reflect the real world. The statistics for METCO are just amazing, nearly 98 percent of the kids who ride the bus from the city graduate from high school in four years – that’s almost unparalleled in any segregated inner city high school – and virtually all of them go on to four-year colleges.
You asked about success. When I say successful, I mean much more than merely in academic terms. I mean, those numbers are the ones that the media finds persuasive, understandably. But I mean also the ability to reach across the lines of class and race in a comfortable way. Not in some artificial, one-day multicultural celebration. I mean, to do it comfortably all the time as a normal way of life, and to make enduring friendships with kids of other races. I also mean the creation of an atmosphere of learning, in which children’s curiosities are not suppressed, where they’re allowed to ask tough questions. I sometimes say where they’re allowed to interrogate reality and where their voices are not silenced.
And also for the most part, these are happy schools, where students are actually excited to get up on Monday morning.
Nyah: When we get to the core of it, it’s about finding joy in learning, right? And I think a truly integrated school, one that values integration, creates an atmosphere of joy, of abundance of knowledge, that then helps create relationships across difference.
Jonathan: With a little ingenuity and a lot of money, because it would take money to do this, we could create what are essentially metro-wide school districts. It’s the politicians that are preventing these ideas from taking root.
Nyah: I’ve found there’s a difference between speaking about desegregation – simply moving bodies – and integration, which you talk about. Integration is also about, for example, having Black educators in a school so that students can see themselves in diverse teachers. And integration is about students being able to create real relationships with people that are from a different socioeconomic background. There are so many different factors that go into a truly integrated school. We need to be clear that when we say we want an integrated school, we mean all of these beautiful and wonderful things in one place.
Jonathan: Yes. In METCO, we never used the word desegregation. We call it integration.
I sort of fantasize in the book. I say if I had the power, if I were the president, I would propose something like a $500 billion federal grant to incentivize districts all over the country to replicate the model I’ve described here in Massachusetts. Cover transportation costs, recruit more teachers of color, reinvent the curriculum so it dignifies every child, and also teaches children that they have the right to speak truth to power.
Nyah: Someone asked a question in the chat. They said, As a 30-something non-parent, I’ve been considering the role of intergenerational organizing in my work. Jonathan, how has intergenerational organizing factored into your incredible work?
Jonathan: Good question. It’s one of the things that’s kept me going all these years. I also rely for strength and for optimism on my lifelong closeness to the parents of children that I’ve taught, or whom I’ve come to know through political events. And that began years ago. When I was teaching in Boston, after school I used to go to one of the children’s homes. I would just knock on the door. And sometimes the mother would freak out because nobody from the school ever visited unless their child had, you know, just done something terrible. But I would say, no, I just wanted to get to know you. Those friendships have lasted forever.
Of course, those people are almost the same generation as I am, but what strengthens me even more is the younger generation. The generation that maybe are now in their 40s, who are the children I may have taught or their younger siblings, and who remember me as a sort of a friend as well as a teacher. And they come to my house now to check on me, to make sure I’m okay at my age. So those intergenerational bonds, those are the bonds that keep me going.
And I’m very grateful because some of my former students now kind of take care of me. They’re worried about my cough. They say I’ve been coughing too much the past few weeks. I just say, well, if you don’t want to cough, don’t ever write a book, because you’ll have to do too many interviews. But I’ve enjoyed this one with you.
I also want to make one quick point. My new book is a fierce condemnation of the education system as it exists now, but I’m not condemning teachers. By and large, the teachers I know are wonderful human beings. They are original and creative, they’re funny and whimsical. I taught in METCO for two years and I remember every day it was like a celebration of childhood.
Nyah: That’s a beautiful sentiment that I wish was in more schools, that it’s a celebration of childhood. As a last question, is there any advice you have for advocates who are continuing to lead this fight for school integration?
Jonathan: What I often urge people, because I get emails from people with these concerns every day, I often say, don’t be afraid of being castigated by officials who have more power than you. And don’t let yourself be bullied by these private sector experts who are often sent into the public schools nowadays to tell you how to be more severe and efficient in the classroom.
I also often say, don’t be afraid of trouble that’s disruptive of other people’s convenience because if a protest doesn’t inconvenience the day-to-day life of a municipality, it’s not going to have much effect, to be honest. I often tell teachers I admire (I know a lot of wonderful and feisty teachers who feel absolutely crippled in these classrooms), I tell them: Don’t be afraid to spread your wings.
Nyah: I love that sentiment, particularly because I think a lot of our educators need to hear that right now, that that they are wanted and needed and their joy is welcomed.
Jonathan: Children get no shot at a second childhood. This is it, they have it now and then it’s gone forever. Don’t wait too long.
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