Deb Aronson

Jonathan Kozol: Bearing Witness

Addressing Inequities in Public Education

First appeared in NCTE Council Chronicle in November 2007 under Features

As a young teacher in the 1960s, all Jonathan Kozol wanted to do was to share his passion for great literature with his students. So he read them poems. He read poems by William Butler Yeats, and he read poems by Robert Frost. The principal applauded him. But then Kozol read Langston Hughes poems to his students and he was fired.

That experience gave Kozol a mission he has pursued over 43 years and 12 books. Kozol has spent his life bearing witness and testifying about the deep inequities in our public educational system. Along the way he has also inspired other teachers to find their passion and pass it on to their children, even if it means occasionally bending the rules.

Teachers Themselves Have Always Been Kozol’s Heroes

With titles like Death at an Early Age, Illiterate America, Savage Inequalities and The Shame of the Nation, Kozol’s books have kept people from becoming complacent about our society in general and about our educational system in particular. Sam Allis in the Boston Globe recently described Kozol as “our national conscience and scold about public education.”

But teachers themselves have always been Kozol’s heroes. He admires them, he encourages them, and he celebrates them.

His most recent book, Letters to a Young Teacher (2007), is a collection of correspondence between him and one such hero, Francesca, a young teacher whose classroom he visited almost weekly throughout one year. Although in this book Kozol continues to point out the deep inequities and just plain meanness inflicted on the poor through the public school system, Letters also contains a generous dollop of glee and optimism, which helps remind teachers everywhere why they took up this challenge.

“It’s the first genuinely cheerful book I’ve ever written,” says Kozol. “This book is written as an invitation to a challenging but beautiful profession.”

That invitation is directed at young people Kozol meets as he crisscrosses the country, speaking, testifying and researching.

“There are hundreds of thousands of young, incandescent people like Francesca coming out of universities now who want to teach in inner city schools. I meet them everywhere I go,” says Kozol. “They ask me, ‘can you help me find a job in an inner city school?’ Because they believe the front lines of democracy are there.”

“NCLB Is the Worst Single Piece of Legislation in My Lifetime”

While Kozol puts teachers and idealistic college students on the side of the angels, administrators and, particularly, legislators, are on the side of the demons. He saves a special place in hell for those who crafted and implemented the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation and “high-stakes” testing.

“NCLB is the worst single piece of legislation in my lifetime so far,” says the 71-year-old. “There is an atmosphere of siege in the worst inner city schools. NCLB was never intended to improve public education, but as a shaming ritual for inner city schools, to pave the way for vouchers,” he asserts. “These high-stakes tests are useless to the teacher. Tests are sent away and almost never returned until mid-summer. Their function is entirely punitive.”

Kozol points out that, while suburban schools suffer from the same mandates, they are able to minimize the impact of NCLB. One, because suburban students generally meet the test score criteria and two, because suburban schools are not as heavily reliant on the Title I funds that are withheld when schools fail to meet those criteria.

“If we are truly concerned with closing the achievement gap between poor and wealthy schools, we would treasure the teachers who can bring a contagious love of literature and a contagious sense of joyfulness into the classroom and we would cap every inner city elementary classroom at 18 children, 22 at the secondary school level,” says Kozol, who has advocated this position to lawmakers everywhere, as well as in his numerous books.

Stellar Teaching Takes Creativity, Enthusiasm, and Love

Ultimately, Kozol asserts, teaching, stellar teaching, is really an art and takes creativity, enthusiasm, and love. The assembly line or “scientific” approach, which includes dictating every little step teachers take, setting every objective down in a standards and accountability document full of big, meaningless words, not only sucks the life out of the classroom, it shortchanges children in ways from which they may never recover.

“Many of the productivity and numbers specialists who have rigidified and codified school policy,” he writes to Francesca, “do not seem to recognize much preexisting value in the young mentalities of children, especially children of the poor.”

Another disturbing and correlated trend Kozol has observed concerns the use of business models and language even in elementary schools. Instead of posters on the wall encouraging children to, for example, read for pleasure, there are posters saying the reason to achieve these skills is to contribute to the American economy and to help us “sharpen our competitive edge in the global marketplace.

“Children don’t care about becoming contributors to the American economy,” he says. “They care about belly buttons, itchy elbows and caterpillars.”

While he’s at it, Kozol also aims his ire at the language of “standards & accountability,” which requires a teacher to write on the chalkboard: “English Language Arts No. E-2, {subtopic } D…The student will produce a narrative procedure.”

In other words, children will write a story.

“Loaded with pretentious polysyllables, standards are not good writing, but junk verbiage,” says Kozol. “Francesca would tell me, ‘No ordinary mortal needs to know the word proficiency.’ Instead, she taught her children polysyllabic words that are interesting, like bamboozle.”

Kozol exhorts teachers, first and foremost, to make their classrooms marvelous places. But beyond that he urges them to bear witness on behalf of children.

“There is no better witness to the gross injustice of apartheid curriculum that has been introduced by NCLB than the teacher in the classroom, so I beg teachers to speak out,” he says. “If enough teachers would say in public what they tell me privately, we could bring this testing madness to a halt and go back to being teachers.”

Having been fired from his own first teaching job for bending the rules, Kozol has some advice for those still in the trenches.

“If you suspect you are going to dissent in certain ways from this “drill and grill” curriculum, here are the ways to protect yourself,” he says. “First, respect your principal. Second, reach out to the veteran literacy teachers. Amongst them you’ll find some who are wise, seasoned and share your values about teaching and so will give you a feeling of protection and you won’t feel isolated. Third, reach out as quickly as possible to parents, especially those who seem most resistant. And fourth, be so good at what you do that you become inexpendable. In a school that has had high teacher turnover, being a teacher who can bring calm to a classroom and win the loyalty of parents is a teacher no one is going to dare to fire.”