Jonathan Kozol Quotes

We cannot ignore the disparity in resources that continue to plague many of our school systems, especially those serving predominantly inner-city minority and impoverished children.

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 present, black children are more segregated in their public schools than at any time since 1968. In the inner-city schools I visit, minority children typically represent 95 percent to 99 percent of class enrollment.

Federal, state and municipal policies have isolated many children, especially in urban districts, into schools that are segregated by race, class and income.

The 'niche' effect of charter schools guarantees a swift and vicious deepening of class and racial separation.

I had been very focused on the issue of education disparities in our country, and literally, by the time kids are just nine years old, in low-income communities, they're already three or four grade levels behind nine-year-olds in high-income communities.

If you're poor, you don't often live near a good school. If it's a competitive public school program, our kids are not prepared to enter those programs.

I wish we could do a better job of understanding what we're doing to kids, because it can be better. It's unfair to give up on these young black kids. We don't do that to white kids.

We have a locale-based education system; we have increasing economic segregation. We clearly need a larger federal program to try to help disadvantaged districts.

Why doesn't anyone care that the schools in Harlem have been unsuccessful for half a century? Why is this not a big deal? To me, it's a terrible deal.

So one of the things that happened with integration in the South is they found that the black teachers were much more educated than the white teachers.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

I cannot understand how the education of this United States of America has been fooled time and time again. Either make it separate but equal or integrate, therefore it will be equal. And it has been separate and unequal.

For too long, we financed our schools in a way that has systematically left large segments of our population behind.

I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: 'Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.'

Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.

The gap in education in this country, the unfairness of the schools, is one of the great unfairness in this society.

The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.

The promise of equal educational opportunity envisioned by the Brown decision remains unfulfilled.

I am very fortunate I can send my kids to private school, but everybody does not have the money. If you cannot get your kid in a good school today, your kids are going to be behind the eight ball.

I think a lot of people don't have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students.

There will always be places in the world where good schools don't exist and good teachers don't want to go, not just in the developing world but in places of socioeconomic hardship.

In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than 1 in 5 girls make it to secondary school.

In fact, the Harvard study data indicates that 70 percent of African American children attend schools that are predominately African American, about the same level as in 1968 when Dr. King died.

It is fast becoming an article of political faith that financing America's public schools by way of the local property tax is a shame and a civic scandal.