Jonathan Kozol Quotes

We know that the enemy of upward mobility is not poverty or even other people's success. The enemy of upward mobility is apathy and an educational system that offers choice to the privileged and traps the most vulnerable in unsafe and poor performing schools.

I want kids to be able to escape failing schools that trap them. And it's an unequal trapping of children. The most affluent find a way to escape. They move to a great suburban district or send their kid to a private school. The people who are trapped in the worst schools that have been terrible often for half a century? Those are the poorest kids.

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.

Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.

And I think that we in America need to understand that many schools need improvement, and particularly with respect to how they're serving minority children.

Ending educational inequality is going to require systemic change and a long-term, sustained effort. There are no shortcuts and no silver bullets.

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

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.

Obviously, this whole 'no child left behind' idea is more rhetoric than actual practice.

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.

I grew up in a very progressive family and with a great educational system, and I asked myself, 'Why doesn't everybody have these opportunities for a good education? So why not give back to these kids who didn't grow up with the same privileges I had?'

An education system suits some more than others. It can lead you out into life or lead you on a wild goose chase. It can help to make you miserable, or dull and nasty and insipid, or profoundly stupid in the special way that 'brainy' people can be.

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.

In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.

Evils of the gravest kind are likely to result from the so-called public schools.

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.

The list of costly services that supplement some children's public education is growing longer and now includes consultants, tutors, and test prep. That's in addition to the homework help some stay-at-home parents can afford to provide.

To see, once again, that African American students are more likely to have a limited math curriculum and an underpaid novice teacher is disheartening and should be a call to action for policymakers and educators.

Of course, the American education system is very inefficient in many ways compared to other countries in Europe or Japan, but it works in such a way that at least the few people who are going onto unusual careers and science can manage to get into that, even though they go through an earlier stage that doesn't give them much.

You can't have a competitive, egalitarian meritocracy if only some of your citizens have the opportunity for a good education.

Canadians would not tolerate it if they really knew there was a whole generation of aboriginal Canadians who have a chance at a better education and are being denied it.

I am pro-education. I'm just anti the system.

The public schools in our neighborhood were so bad that the teachers in the school said you shouldn't send your kids here. My mother called around and found a school that was willing to give both me and my brother scholarship money. It's a classic story about black parents wanting more for their kids than they had for themselves.