Savage Inequalities

http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~Daniel_schugurensky/assignment1/1991kozol.html

This is a truly appalling look at the state of public education in our country. What I like most about this book is that you not only get to hear the authors opinions but you get to hear what the children themselves feel and think about their situations. I worry that we are raising a generation without hope or ambition. When you read the interviews with these children (some as young as 6 years old), what shocked me most was the apathy and acceptance even in the very young of their "lot" in life. Some of the brightest children in these schools were only "hoping" to attain mediocre career and educational goals. "Many urban high school students do not study math but "business math"-essentially, a very elemental level of bookkeeping. Job-specific courses such as "cosmetology", which would be viewed as insults by suburban parents, are common and are seen as realistic preparation." "Stopping in the doorway of a room with seven stoves and three refrigerators, I am told by a teacher that this is a class called "Introductory Home Ec." I ask her whether she regards this class as preparation for employment. "Not this class," she says. "The ones who move on to Advanced Home Ec. Are given job instruction." When I ask her what jobs they are trained for, she says: "Fast food places-Burger King, McDonald's."
While visiting a kindergarten class room the author quotes some very disturbing statistics, "Twelve years from now, by the junior year of high school, if the neighborhood statistics hold true for these children, 14 of these 23 boys and girls will have dropped out of school. Fourteen years from now, four of these kids, at most, will go to college. Eighteen years from now, one of those four may graduate from college, but three of the 12 boys in this kindergarten will have already spent time in prison."
At a high school the author is told, "Of 33 children who begin the history classes in the standard track, he says, more than a quarter have dropped out by spring semester. "Maybe 24 are left in June. Mind you, this is in the junior year. We're speaking of the children who survived. Ninth and tenth grades are the more horrendous years for leaving school. I have four girls right now in my senior home room who are pregnant or have just had babies." When I ask them why this happens, I am told, " Well, there's no reason not to have a baby. There's not much for me in public school".
It is hard enough to imagine a child living with no medical care to speak of, most of the children haven't or rarely see a dentist and many have to live with abscesses and rotting teeth. "Although dental problems don't command the instant fears associated with low birth weight, fetal death rate or cholera, they do have the consequence of wearing down the stamina of children and defeating their ambitions. Bleeding gums, impacted teeth and rotting teeth are routine matters for the children I have interviewed. The children get use to feeling constant pain. Children live for months with pain that grown-ups would find unendurable. But, to me, most shocking is to see a child with an abscess that has been inflamed for weeks and that he has simply lived with and accepts as part of the routine of life. Many teachers in urban schools have seen this. It is almost common place."
Most are malnutrition and survive off of school meals that are themselves woefully nutritionally inadequate (ketchup as a vegetable?). Children have already learned in grade school to pocket food for the weekends. Health insurance is unheard of. Many have parents that work 2 and three jobs and/or live on some type of assistance. Many have a parent that is absent (often incarcerated). And an appalling number have been abused. They often get very little support or encouragement from their parents. They live in neighborhoods where prostitution and drug dealing is an everyday occurrence, (and sometimes considered a viable career path). They watch TV and movies where even the family situational comedy where the characters are suppose to be portraying, "middle income America", seems just as much of a fantasy life as the latest time traveling science fiction blockbuster. "They see suburban schools on television and they see them when they travel for athletic competitions. Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too. By fifth or sixth grade, many children demonstrate their loss of faith by staying out of school. The director of a social service agency estimates that 10 percent of the 12 and 13 year old children that he sees are out of school for all but one or two days every two weeks."
How with the odds already stacked so tragically against them can they have any hope of bettering themselves in a school where, textbooks, if they even have them, are 15-20 years old. (the author found history classes being taught with textbooks that still had Richard Nixon as president!) Science labs with no equipment, no computers, vocational labs for "career training" that are out of date and with broken equipment. Schools with 700 students and only 2 working bathrooms (some schools raw sewage frequently backed up from the bathrooms to the school kitchens). "Sewage flowed into the basement, through the floor, then up into the kitchen and the students' bathrooms. The backup, occurred in the food preparation areas. School is resumed the following morning at the high school, but a few days later the overflow recurs. This time the entire system is affected, since the meals distributed to every student in the city are prepared in the two schools that have been flooded." "Before I leave, I enter a boy's bathroom. Four of the six toilets do not work. The toilets stalls, which are eaten away by red and brown corrosion, have no doors. The toilets have no seats. One has a rotted wooden stump. There are no paper towels and no soap. Near the door there is a loop of wire with an empty toilet-paper roll. "This," says Sister Julia, "is the best school in the district."
Even if these children beat the odds and graduate, "27 percent of high school graduates read at the eighth grade level or below; and a large proportion of these students read at less than sixth grade level. Those very few that who graduate and go to college rarely read well enough to handle college level courses. At most city's community colleges, which receive most of their students from public schools, the noncompletion rate is 97 percent. Of 35,000 students working toward degrees in the community colleges, only 1,000 annually complete the program and receive degrees."
Classroom sizes are often so large that teachers cannot form any type of relationship with the children in their classes much less devote time to children that are falling behind or have special needs. "If you have a high school teacher with five classes each day and between 150 and 175 students, it's going to have a devastating effect. The schools systems, it should also be noted, has been using more than 70 "permanent substitute teachers," who are paid only $10,000. Yearly, as a way of saving money. Average class size in this school is 30. Ideal class size for these kids would be 15 to 20. If we do not give these children a sufficient education to lead healthy and productive lives, we will be their victims later on. We'll pay the price someday-in violence, in economic costs." "One city in New Jersey is so short of space that four elementary schools now occupy abandoned factories. Children at one wood-framed elementary school, which has no cafeteria or indoor space for recreation, eat lunch in a section of the boiler room. A bathroom houses reading classes"
Schools can vary drastically in their condition, equipment, and crowding in one district to the next, "A comparison between an elementary school in Paterson and one in nearby Wayne, the school in Wayne is 33 years old and holds 323 children. The school in Paterson is 60 years old and holds 615 children. The first school has 395 square feet per child, the second 87 square feet. The first school has 40,000 square feet of playing area, the second 3,000 square feet. The kindergarten in the first school holds 15 to 18 children. A room the same size in the second school holds 60 children divided into two groups of 30 each and separated only by a row of file cabinets."
Many of these teachers are being paid much less than in the wealthier districts, "I get $38,000 after nearly 30 years of teaching. If I went across the river to one of the suburbs of St. Louis, I'd be earning $47,000, maybe more. If I taught in the Chicago suburbs, at a wealthy high school, I'd be getting close to $60,000. Money's not an issue for me, since I wouldn't want to leave; but for new, incoming teachers, this much differential is a great deterrent. When you consider than many teachers are afraid to come here in the first place or, if they are not afraid, are nontheless offended by the setting or intimidated by the challenge of the job, there should be a premium and not a punishment for teaching in schools like this." "The salary scale, too low to keep exciting, youthful teachers in the system, leads the city to rely on low paid subs, who represent more than a quarter of the teaching force. "We have teachers," Mrs. Collins says, "who only bother to come in three days a week. One of these teachers comes in usually around nine-thirty. You ask her how she can expect the kids to care about their education if the teacher doesn't even come till nine-thirty. She answers you, "It makes no difference. Kids like these aren't going anywhere."
But even substitute teachers are quite frequently in short supply, "On an average morning 5,700 children in 190 classrooms come to school to find they have no teacher." "We have been in this class a whole semester," says a 15 year old, "and they still can't find us a teacher." "A student in auto mechanics says he'd been in class 16 weeks before he learned to change a tire. His first teacher quit at the beginning of the year. Another teacher slept through most of the semester. "You can talk. Just keep it down." Soon he would be asleep. "Let's be real," the student says. "Most of us ain't going to college...We could have used a class like this." At one high school students often have two or three "study Halls" a day, in part to save the cost of teachers. "Not much studying goes on in study hall," a supervising teacher says. "I let the students play cards...I figure they might get some math skills out of it."
Many of the teachers interviewed (most were almost 60 years old) felt overwhelmed, tired, and defeated. They stated over and over that they felt they weren't getting any support from the districts in which they taught, the city officials, the government, and even from the parents of the children in their classes. Only one example was mentioned out of all of the schools and classes the author visited of a parent coming in to help out in the classroom. Most teachers stated that homework was almost pointless as the parents (even if they did make the effort or have the time to try to help with it), didn't have the reading and math skills themselves to understand it.
This book is very frightening to me as I am about to become a parent myself yet I have known many people of my generation that are "High School Graduates", and can't write a decent cover letter or resume. I know a few people that consider having a high school diploma the same as being "educated". I read some of the blogs and personal websites on the internet and I am shocked at the poor grammar and lack of any type of sentence structure. I wonder if these people don't know any better or if they just don't care. I remember when I went to high school, it only took 16 credits to graduate (my mother's high school required 16 credits to graduate in the 1950's). Drama counted as an English credit, drivers education was a fine art credit, there were no computers in the school for students, (yet myself and quite a few others had them at home), and home ec. Was a REQUIRED course as was typing! It was almost impossible not to have all of your required credits by your junior year yet I know at least 25 kids that dropped out or flunked out of my graduation class, (many of them teenage girls that became pregnant. In spite of this, they wouldn't offer any sex ed. Because they reasoned it would encourage the students to start having sex), it may have been even more. I went to college at 17 but because the district refused to release my high school diploma until my class graduated (over a year later), even though I had obtained all of the required credits, I had to take my GED for college admission. I tested with several drop outs and several adults that had flunked the GED several times before. I remember one girl telling me that she had been told if she flunked it again this time, she would have to wait six months before she was allowed to test again. It was her fourth time trying to pass it. I was very nervous having heard all of this when they handed out the first packet which was the social studies test. I opened my packet and almost laughed at its simplicity. The questions were fifth grade level at the most. The test would ask a question about a historical date or fact one way giving some of the details like the date and who was involved but not what had actually occurred or what the act did then a few questions further down the same historical date or fact would be asked about again this time giving the answer to the first question in its wording and asking about a detail that was mentioned in the previous questions wording. There were MANY examples of this on that test as well as the other tests, including the 2-3 "algebra" questions on the math tests. Every test was multiple choice. Yet most of the people testing that evening had flunked that test SEVERAL times! If my mother hadn't insisted that I read, "The Classics"and purchased workbooks for me from the time I could read, (Which was before I ever attended kindergarten), maybe I too would have been sitting there flunking it that night also. I must admit that I know and still know lots of parents that don't take much if any interest in their children's education. I know several homes that have children that don't even have a dictionary much less a set of encyclopedias. I know too of homes where the family computer is used as a sexual aid and as a toy instead of an educational tool. When I first became pregnant, I went out and bought baby flash cards, books, and educational CD's. I was raised that a certain amount of education SHOULD and is EXPECTED to be done at home. I have had two teachers as friends in my life and both earned much less than I did (even the first friend who I knew when I was working as a CNA). They both worked in poorer districts (one because she was bilingual and the other because he himself lived in the poorer area due to his paltry wages). Both expressed (in different ways but essentially the same message), that some parents treated school as free daycare and some even seemed annoyed when they tried to address concerns about their children to them as if it was the teachers problem and not the parents concern. I have even seen this mentality in parents I have known. I worry what our countries future is going to be like when the children the author mentions become adults and what effect it will have on our crime, homeless, and employment rates.
How much worse does our educational system have to get before the government and the parents take action?
How much further behind do we have to get compared to other "developed" countries before we realize that we are quickly becoming a nation of ignorants?
I hope that others will read this book and take an interest and action even if it is only with their own children.