He tells me I will find them more than willing to engage me in debate, and this turns out to be correct. In the case of New York City and particularly Riverdale, however, it takes on a special poignance. Some experts, I observe, believe that class size isn’t a real issue. The projection I have heard for this year’s ninth grade class is that 150 or so may graduate four years from now. “Half the students will be gone by Christmastime, they say. These racial breakdowns prove to be predictive of the schoolwide pattern. It has to come from taxes. (Kozol p.138) High unemployment, high taxes, and reduced property values add to the community’s problems. There are two holes in the ceiling. East St. Louis schools have serious financial problems. “I just don’t think it’s going to happen. They place their hands across their hearts and join their voices in a tribute to “one nation indivisible” which promises liberty and justice to all people. There are, at least, some outside windows in this room—it is the only room with windows in the school—and the room has a high ceiling. Fix the roof and paint the halls so it will not be so depressing.”. Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol is a book that focuses on the American education system. “About 130 do,” he says. P.S. The suburbs have better administrations (sometimes, but not always), and they also have a lot more money in proportion to their children’s needs. Within Within Savage InequalitiesSavage Inequalities •• Kozol argues that AmericaKozol argues that America’’s schools are more s schools are more segregated now then they were in 1954. segregated now then they were in 1954. When a task force set up by the governor offered its suggestions five years later, it argued that 100 percent equality was too expensive. Last Reviewed on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. “Out-and-out racism, which in our city and our society is institutionalized,” said David Dinkins in 1987, a year before he was elected mayor, “has allowed this to go on for years.”, But the racial explanation is aggressively rejected by the medical establishment. He had no confidence in his ability. Questions of unfairness feel more like a geometric problem than a matter of humanity or conscience. The first is that the fiscal inequalities “do matter very much” in shaping what a school can offer (“That is obvious,” one student says) and that any loss of funds in Rye, as a potential consequence of future equalizing, would be damaging to many things the town regards as quite essential. No sign identifies the building as a school. “I’m against busing,” Max repeats, although this subject hasn’t been brought up by anybody else in a long while. Then they look around them at their school. “Taxing the rich to help the poor—we’d be getting nothing out of it. Nationwide, black children are three times as likely as white children to be placed in classes for the mentally retarded but only half as likely to be placed in classes for the gifted: a well-known statistic that should long since have aroused a sense of utter shame in our society. Forman invites her to come in and, after she has given him a message (“Carmen had to leave—for an emergency”) and gone to her next class, his face breaks out into a smile. Suddenly, no doubt unwittingly, they find themselves opposed to simple things they would have died for 20 years before. The only social worker in the school has 30 minutes in a week to help a troubled child. Moreover, she observes, students who do not meet “acceptable standards” in their chosen schools are sent back to schools like Jackson, making it effectively a dumping ground for children who are unsuccessful elsewhere. Water still cascades down the stairs. You get the worst.”. ó � K S o c n ² ª É ˆ ‰ ã ã ã Ê Ê Ê Ê Ê Ê ª � � � � � � Æ) Ğ p@à°€P ğ! In order to find Public School 261 in District 10, a visitor is told to look for a mortician’s office. $ Ò Ï ¶ * : P P P P P P N P P P P P P $ … ¥ ® t ¾ P P P P P t ô ¾ ¾ P P ‰ ô ô ô P " ¾ P ¾ P N ô P N ô Z ô N ¾ ¾ N P €K�œûÄÒ ä ¶ According to the principal, the school has 96 computers for 546 children. [In his newest book, Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities, exposes the shameful levels of segregation and inequality present in U.S. schools. Until 1983, Mississippi was one of the few states with no kindergarten program and without compulsory attendance laws. Kozol emphasizes the purity and innocence of the children he meets in every chapter. They have 17 to 20 children in a class. You’re just dismissing them.…”. Does this perpetuate the myth of "good poor" vs. "bad poor"? Many of the poor live in low-income housing. „ 1$`„ $ Æ) Ğ p@à°€P ğ! At eleven o’clock, about 200 children in a top-floor room are watching Forman’s theater class performing The Creation by James Weldon Johnson. The window is broken. . New York City manages expertly, and with marvelous predictability, whatever it considers humanly important. 24 are in full blossom on the day I visit. The Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association began a television advertising campaign to defeat the bill, according to a Newsweek story. The school is 99.3 percent Hispanic. In an ethical society, where money was apportioned in accord with need, these scalings would run almost in precise reverse. The school therefore contains effectively two separate schools: one of about 130 children, most of whom are poor, Hispanic, black, assigned to one of the 12 special classes; the other of some 700 mainstream students, almost all of whom are white or Asian. Savage Inequalities is a savage indictment. The reason, several students say straightforwardly, is “racial” or, as others say it, “out-and-out racism” on the part of adults. Walking next into a special class, I see twelve children. Many experts, I observe, believe that wealth is more important in determining these inequalities. The “special” class I enter first, by way of contrast, has twelve children of whom only one is white and none is Asian. Two years ago, in order to meet this and other problems, New York City’s Office of School Safety started buying handcuffs. “Some years ago the chancellor was caught in borrowing $100,000 from the schools. At Public School 79, serving poorer children to the south, the principal says that he is forced to take the “tenth-best” teachers. (Kozol p.23) In his interviews with students and administrators the question of inequalities in classes, teachers, and facilities are discussed. Whether such courage or such vision will someday become transcendent forces in our nation is by no means clear. To speak of the former and evade the latter is a formula that guarantees that nothing will be done today for children who have no responsibility for either problem. ”, At three o’clock the nurse arrives to do her record-keeping. A doctor who has worked for many years in the South Bronx notes that views like these are masked by our apparently benevolent attempts to rectify the damage that we have permitted: “Once these babies, damaged by denial of sufficient health care for their mothers, have been born impaired, we hook them up to tubes and place them on a heated table in an isolette and do our very best to save their lives. These are the hospitals. “I love the style of these kids,” the counselor says. Lights are falling from the ceiling. It is in conformity with the theory of equality … to give as near as possible to every youth an equal state in life.” Americans, he said, “are unwilling that any should be deprived in childhood of the means of competition.”. A first-year English teacher at another high school in the Bronx calls me two nights later: “I’ve got five classes—42 in each! 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.4 out of 5.0 5 Stars 94 4 Stars 35 3 Stars 12 2 Stars 5 1 Stars 4 Performance. Don’t miss it!”. “My family is originally from the Bronx. Money isn’t the whole story.…”, “In New York,” says Jennifer, “rich people put their kids in private school. I don’t understand how it would make a better educational experience for me.”, “A child’s in school only six hours in a day,” says Max. I’d have a chance to track them down, go to their homes, see them on the weekends.… I don’t understand why people in New York permit this.”. Max raises a different point. In equally poor Greene County, Mississippi, things got so bad in the winter of 1988 that children enrolled at Sand Hill Elementary School had to bring toilet paper, as well as writing paper, from their homes because, according to the Jackson Daily News, “the school has no money for supplies.” In the same year, Time magazine described conditions in the Mississippi town of Tunica. Very few. To the left of the school is a playground for small children, with an innovative jungle gym, a slide and several climbing toys. The room has a low ceiling. If his father’s in the streets, his mother’s using crack … how is money going to make a difference?”, David dismisses this and tells me, “Here’s what we should do. Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" Jonathan Kozol's "Savage Inequalities: Children America's Schools" There has recently been much controversy regarding genes, as technology has made it possible for people to make intriguing discoveries regarding the topic and a series of individuals have come up with interesting theories concerning genes. The school has adequate resources, good administration, and offers an advanced curriculum. Classrooms were overcrowded. (208). To the degree, moreover, that destructive family situations may be bettered by the future acts of government, no one expects that this could happen in the years immediately ahead. “Let me answer that,” says Israel, a small, wiry Puerto Rican boy. But what about the others? The author visited segregated schools in the area where Dr. Martin Luther King once lived. “When it rains,” one of the counselors says, “that barrel will be full.” I ask her how the kids react. Kozol, the Wall Street Journal, and various interview subjects One of them hopes to be a doctor. All the students hope to go to college. The high school is a short ride from the station. r N N Ÿ 0 Ï N S ˆ l S N ô Ò Ò ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ Ù SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1Running head: READING REACTION: SAVAGE INEQUALITIES Reading Reaction Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools Margaret England Florida Gulf Coast University Abstract Most of the events in this book take place between 1988 and 1990 in poor urban and less affluent suburban schools across America. Savage Inequalities study guide by AllyDoerman includes 6 questions covering vocabulary, terms and more. „ 1$`„ a$ Æ) Ğ p@à°€P ğ! The point is often made that, even with a genuine equality of schooling for poor children, other forces still would militate against their school performance. If you did it, you’d be changing the whole economic system. It’s as simple as that,” she says. There is a computer in each class. Among black children in East Harlem, it is even higher: 42 per thousand, which would be considered high in many Third World nations. What do they get?” Then, as he spreads his hands out on his desk, he says: “I have to ask myself why there should be an elementary school in District 10 with fifteen hundred children. Laurie elaborates on the same point: “Some things you know. I can’t add five teachers. “Give it another two hundred years,” says Alexander. Female students tell me that they shower after school to wash the plaster from their hair. Sitting in his office in a pinstripe shirt and red suspenders, his feet up on the table, he is interrupted by a stream of kids. There is a tremendous gulf between their skills and capabilities. A year later, when I visit Morris High, most of these conditions are unchanged. The plaster is gone, exposing rusted metal bars embedded in the outside wall. We leave the apartment and walk downstairs to the street. Sheets of torn construction paper have been taped to windowpanes, but the glare is quite relentless. “Logic and syllogisms,” she replies. When all the kids show up, five of us have to stand in back.”. Chapter 3, "The Savage Inequalities of Public Education in New York," Summary and Analysis. He wants to go to college and he knows that math and English are important, but he’s feeling overwhelmed, especially in math. The windows are decorated with attractive, brightly colored curtains and look out on flowering trees. download 2 files . But the answers that are given to that question, as we know, will be determined by class expectations. Questioned about differences in physical appearances between the richer and the poorer schools, he says, “I think it’s demographics.”, Sometimes a school principal, whatever his background or his politics, looks into the faces of the children in his school and offers a disarming statement that cuts through official ambiguity. New York City’s public schools are subdivided into 32 school districts. Two want to be lawyers. Advertisements in the New York Times will frequently inform prospective buyers that a house is “in the neighborhood of P.S. Chappaqua’s yearly spending figure rose above $9,000. The systems and bureaucracies are different. These students live in a tough neighborhood, but they are children and I speak to them as children.”. i D @ñÿ D N o r m a l 1$ 7$ 8$ H$ CJ _HaJ mH sH tH. I despair of making this appeal in any terms but these. But that is not the situation that exists. Nine white, one Chinese. Many do care and they do try, but there’s a feeling of despair. People would pull out their kids. The funeral home, which faces Jerome Avenue in the North Bronx, is easy to identify by its green awning. Carissa hopes to be a businesswoman. The school is integrated in the strict sense that the middle- and upper-middle-class white children here do occupy a building that contains some Asian and Hispanic and black children; but there is little integration in the classrooms since the vast majority of the Hispanic and black children are assigned to “special” classes on the basis of evaluations that have classified them “EMR”—“educable mentally retarded”—or else, in the worst of cases, “TMR”—“trainable mentally retarded.”, I ask the principal if any of his students qualify for free-lunch programs. Scattered across the floor amid the trash: “English Instructional Worksheets: 1984.”. If you ask me why, I’d have to speak of race and social class. I have to bus some 60 kindergarten children elsewhere, since I have no space for them. “Head Start,” the principal says, “scarcely exists in District 10. “They make a face. There is one small gym and children get one period, and sometimes two, each week. “A child identified as a chronic truant,” reports an official of the Rheedlen Foundation, a child welfare agency in New York City, “might be reported by the teacher—or he might not. In the fall of the year, he phones me at my home. In a sun-drenched corner room on the top floor, a female teacher and some 25 black and Hispanic children are reading a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. “Gregor Mendel,” the sixth grader writes, “the Austrian monk who founded the science of genetics, published papers on his work with peas that some experts say were statistically too good to be true. . What is promised these poor children and their parents, says Professor Eli Ginzberg of Columbia University, is “an essential level” of care as “distinct from optimal.” Equity, he states, is “out of the question.” In a similar way, the New York Times observes, a lower quality of education for poor children in New York, as elsewhere in America, is “accepted as a fact.” Inequality, whether in hospitals or schools, is simply not contested. In a student lounge, a dozen seniors are relaxing on a carpeted floor that is constructed with a number of tiers so that, as the principal explains, “they can stretch out and be comfortable while reading.”. How could it be of benefit to us?”. “See, that’s where the trouble starts. Overall. Reading Reaction: Savage Inequalities PAGE 1 2 o * 6 ‘ Ÿ c ² Š Í M O S T É# $ É% ı% ê( ö( , , o6 ¢6 7 7 K7 L7 R7 S7 T7 U7 Z7 öñö í é é í í í íé í í í í é é âßâ×â 0J mH nH u0J j 0J U6�]� 5�\� mH sH j UmH sH % K L ^ ’ £ Á Â Ã Ä Í Î O P Q R S T U V W } ~ ö ó ó ó ó ó ó ó ó ó í í Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô Æ) Ğ p@à°€P ğ! . Even the most thorough exposition of the facts within the major organs of the press is neutralized too frequently by context and a predilection for the type of grayish language that denies the possibilities for indignation. I ask her if they see it as a racial message. She brought the child back to school. The commissioner’s question—“How well is the district doing by the children it enrolls?”—sounds reasonable. Ethical challenges seem to threaten their effectiveness. A boy who may be seven years old climbs on my lap without an invitation and removes my glasses. The same dilemmas are advanced as explanations for the city’s inability to get books into classrooms in sufficient numbers for the class enrollments, or to paint the walls or keep the roofs from leaking. Am I saying that the city underserves this population? The poorer public schools have inadequate equipment, supplies, textbooks, counselors, and libraries. Someone from the public school attendance office might try to contact the parents and might be successful, or he might not. Chapter 2 Other Peoples Children North Lawndale and the South Side of Chicago North Lawndale and the South Side of Chicago are poor communities with high unemployment, gangs, crime, and abandoned factories. “He wasn’t available for me.… I saw him once. Both are first grade classes. But it may be somewhat disingenuous to act as if the larger differences do not effectively predict success or failure for large numbers of schoolchildren. “The building and teachers are part of it, of course. “If they need more buildings, give them extra money so they wouldn’t need to be so crowded.”. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. It’s not a hospital that I will use if I am given any choice. While disagreeing with him on the fairness of this policy, I am not in disagreement on the question of the value of selective schools and am not proposing that such schools should simply not exist. In the street in front of the school there is an elevated public transit line. Then he played Sebastian in The Tempest. Per-pupil funding is above $12,000 at the time I visit. They understand.”, On the following morning I visit P.S. I feel that children have the right to have safe drinking water, clean air, and not to be exposed to dangerous toxins. Some of the changes that need to be made would affect some of the Hendry County’s largest employers. The district can’t afford librarians, the principal says, but P.S. “We are not yet seated at that table,” Victor says. It helps to elevate the value of the homes they have for sale. “I think,” he says, “there’s a different subjective response on the part of doctors.…” And, in explanation of the fact that white patients in cardiac care are two to three times as likely as black patients to be given bypass surgery, he wonders whether white physicians may be “less inclined to invest in a black patient’s heart” than in the heart of a “white, middle-class executive” because the future economic value of the white man, who is far more likely to return to a productive job, is often so much higher. She did not appreciate his words or his assumptions. The author interviews, Delabian Rice-Thurston who discusses visiting a number of poor D.C. schools, which were “92 percent black, 4 percent white, and 4 percent Hispanic and some other ethnics.” (Kozol p.184) Crime and drugs are part of the ghetto community. You look around you at their school, although it’s impolite to do that, and you take a deep breath at the sight of all those beautiful surroundings. The author sees East St. Louis as “a scar of sorts, and ugly metaphor of filth and overspill and chemical effusions, a place for blacks to live and die within, a place for other people to avoid when the are heading for St. Louis “(Kozol p.38). 24, the window shades are clean and new, the floor is neatly tiled in gray and green, and there is not a single light bulb missing. Why not take some money from the budget that we spend on armaments and use it for the children in these urban schools?”, A well-dressed student with a healthy tan, however, says that using federal taxes for the poor “would be like giving charity,” and “charitable things have never worked.… Charity will not instill the poor with self-respect.”, Max returns to something that he said before: “The environment is everything. The principal says that it’s inadequate, but it appears spectacular to me after the cubicle that holds a meager 700 books within the former skating rink. She’s an interesting girl and I reluctantly admire her for being so straightforward. Two thirds of the stained-glass panes are missing and replaced by Plexiglas. The odor from the processing plants and sewage lift stations often fills the air on humid mornings. The principal, a relaxed, unhurried man who, unlike many urban principals, seems gratified to have me visit in his school, takes me in to see the auditorium, which, he says, was recently restored with private charitable funds ($400,000) raised by parents. A plaque in the principal’s office tells a visitor that this is the oldest high school in the Bronx. “We have AP courses and they don’t. What may be at stake among the wealthy, says the AMA, is “overutilization.”. If you equalize the money, someone’s got to be shortchanged. 1$ $ Æ) Ğ p@à°€P ğ! The room is fitted with a planetarium. A 15-year-old boy, wearing a floppy purple hat, white jersey and striped baggy pants, is asked to read the lines. The father’s earnestness, his faith in the importance of these details, and the child’s almost painful shyness stay in my mind later. It has been home for many years to some of the most progressive people in the nation. Why should the Board of Ed allow this? Foreign languages begin in sixth grade at the school, but Spanish is offered also to the kindergarten children. In Oyster Bay the figure was $9,980. “It is,” says the doctor I have cited, “an intriguing explanation. The building couldn’t hold them. Of 140 seniors, 92 are now enrolled in AP classes. After college they have ambitious plans. “The bird destroys himself because he can’t escape the cage.”, “He sings out of the longing to be free.”, At the end of class the teacher tells me, “Forty, maybe 45 percent out of this group will graduate.”. Outside the window of the taxi, aimless men are standing in a semicircle while another man is working on his car. There is a shortage of equipment for classrooms and labs. Every student that I see during my visit to the school is white or Asian, though I later learn there are a number of Hispanic students and that 1 or 2 percent of students in the school are black. The dogwoods and magnolias on the lawn in front of P.S. The children are doing a Spanish language lesson when I enter. Black students are required to go to school in East St. Louis without the hope of being transferred or bussed to a better school. In the sentence “Jack walks to the store,” he is unable to identify the verb. Clinics in the private hospitals are far more likely to be staffed by an experienced physician.”. We have no science room. The students I meet include eleventh and twelfth graders. Morris High School in the South Bronx, for example, says a teacher who has taught here more than 20 years, “does everything an inanimate object can do to keep children from being educated.”, Blackboards at the school, according to the New York Times, are “so badly cracked that teachers are afraid to let students write on them for fear they’ll cut themselves. Even if you bring them here to Rye. Add to this the squalor of the setting and the ever-present message of a child’s racial isolation, and we have in place an almost perfect instrument to guarantee that we will need more handcuffs and, no doubt, more prisons. Home to many of the city’s most sophisticated and well-educated families, its elementary schools have relatively few low-income students. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools 3 observing how schools operate and what kind of education they provide. I ask her, “Is there air conditioning in warmer weather? In a vestibule between the outer and inner glass doors of the school there is a sign with these words: “All children are capable of learning.”. Affluent Bronxville, an attractive suburb just north of the Bronx, spent $10,000 for each pupil. It will cost as much as $50 million to restore the school to an acceptable condition, she reports. An apparent obligation of officials in these situations is to shelter the recipients of privilege from the potential wrath of those who are less favored. He asked his teacher if he could come in for extra help, but she informed him that she didn’t have the time. “It’s a nice fraction of everything,” he says. The students know the term “separate but equal,” but seem unaware of its historical associations. Savage Inequalities is a savage indictment One classroom, we are told, has been sealed off “because of a gaping hole in the floor.” In the band room, “chairs are positioned where acoustic tiles don’t fall quite so often.” In many places, “plaster and ceramic tile have peeled off” the walls, leaving the external brick wall of the school exposed. 0 0 &P P °Ğ/ °à=!° "° #� $� %° °
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