Jonathan Kozol Quotes

Our schools are more segregated today than they have ever been since 1968. The schools that I visit hardly have any white students…. Schools that had desegregated, are now resegregating.

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.

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.

Now we maintain that we cannot be afford to be concerned about 6 percent of the children in this country, black children, who you allow to come into white schools. We have 94 percent who still live in shacks. We are going to be concerned about those 94 percent.

The segregated schools of today are arguably no more equal than the segregated schools of the past.

Students who spend their lives in segregated schools can look forward to a life on the margins.

Growing up in Augusta in such a protected and loving community is something that I really enjoy talking about. I love talking about - even though I grew up, of course, in the time of segregated schools: Brown vs. Board of Education came along after I was already in first grade.

I have never seen any good resulting from educating the Negro.

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

Our political establishment refuses to use the word 'segregated.' They call the schools diverse, which means half black, half Hispanic, and maybe two white kids and three Asians. 'Diverse' has become a synonym for 'segregated.'

Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality.

Educating Negroes is pointless and dangerous. The state should ensure that tax dollars from white citizens should only go to white schools.

We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there's no longer segregation in America's schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.

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.

Segregation of schools is no accident.

We still have two separate public school systems in this country. It’s not [any longer] based on race; it’s based on economics, but that’s related to race.

The segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of law: for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group.

I saw a lot of people of color who didn't study hard because they said the government would take care of them.

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