"Savage Inequalities" exposes conscious racism in American education system

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"Ghetto schools have huge overcrowded classes. Wealthy schools have classes half the size. Poor schools do not have enough books to go around and the books are old and outdated. Wealthy schools have plenty of SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 1992 5 "Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools," by Jonathan Kozol, Crown Publishers, 1991.

I waited a year to read "Savage Inequalities," reading bits and pieces of it in bookstores, waiting for it to be published in paperback. Finally I borrowed it from a teacher's library. But hopefully, you won't wait so long to read this important book.

Remember the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education? In that decision the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate schools for Black and white children were inherently unequal. The ruling changed the law of the land as established in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which ruled that separate public facilities were permitted as long as they were equal.

Jonathan Kozol, in his stunning work, argues that the United States has given up on implementing the Brown decision by failing to desegregate the public schools. He argues that the country has gone back to (or remained in) the time of the Plessy decision, trying to justify separate, grossly unequal schools in the name of concepts such as "local control" and equal "minimum standards." He decries the lack of any interest or attention in implementing the Brown decision.

Ghetto education

East St. Louis, IIl.; Chicago, Ill; New York, N.Y.; Camden, N.J.; Washington, D.C.; San Antonio, Tex.

Kozol visits schools in these cities and compares the schools whose pupils are Black, Latino and poor with the nearly all-white schools in wealthy suburbs located adjacent to them.

Kozol's tour is rich in facts culled from direct observation, interviews, and research. He talks to children of all ages, teachers, administrators, and then paints for the reader an indelible picture of state governments that should be indicted for child abuse for the criminal treatment of the children they are charged with educating.

An ex-member of the Los Angeles street gang, the Crips, quoted in the San Francisco Sunday Examiner (May 31, 1992) said, "South central Los Angeles is a Third World country... What we got is inadequate health care, inadequate housing and inferior education. I wish someone would tell me the difference between Guatemala and south central." This is exactly the conclusion Kozol leads us to by his close examination of ghetto school systems.

Take East St. Louis, IIl., for example— the subject of the first chapter in "Savage Inequalities." Kozol takes us on a tour of this community and its schoolsUrban Development "the most distressed small city in America."

The city lies downwind from some of the country's largest chemical companies and waste incineration plants. The toxic fumes from these plants poison the air, ground, and water of the community, causing diseases (such as lead poisoning). And add to these foul insults, none of these plants pay the local property taxes that are used to support the schools in East St. Louis, .

The companies have created their own incorporated but unpopulated "towns" to escape any responsibility for paying their fair share (which should be 100 percent of the total!) of taxes for local public institutions, even though the toxins they produce are poisoning the children of East St. Louis.

Because the city is on land, that is subject to periodic flooding of the Mississippi River, the schools are often flooded with raw sewage and toxic chemicals.

Amazingly, St. highest property taxes in the state, but the extreme poverty of its residents and the low market value of their dwellings means that there is little money to be collected.

Kozol doesn't discuss schools in a social vacuum. He connects the conditions of the schools with the conditions of the communities they are in. But he doesn't allow the poverty of these communities to stand as an argument for the children getting an inferior education. Why should it? Public education is supposed to help equalize opportunity for all children.

Undemocratic education system Kozol indicts the profoundly anti-democratic nature of school systems that provide an excellent education for children of wealthy families and a demeaning education (if you can even call it education at all) to the children of the poor.

This is a result of how U.S. schools are funded. He describes how funding mechanisms created for the wealthy by their political representatives in state governments use state and federal funds to subsidize their own children's education.

Meanwhile they allow the children of the poor to endure schools that have dangerous and ugly physical plants, overcrowded classrooms, poorly paid teachers, a lack of basic equipment (from books to sports equipment), and educational programs geared to preparing students to pass standardized tests rather than for the joys and rewards of meaningful learning.

Though East St. Louis may be the most "Third World" of the communities surveyed in Kozol's book, the savagery of the inequalities between white and Black new books for all. ..."

schools are most profoundly laid bare by the author when he compares ghetto schools to wealthy suburban schools in communities within a five minute drive of each other, such as Camden, N.J., and adjacent Cherry Hill.

Kozol looeds at class sizes, teachers' salaries, numbers of permanent versus substitute teachers, ratio of counselors to students, science laboratory equipment, sports equipment, textbooks, lunch rooms, playgrounds, and all the things that indicate the quality of an individual school.

He traveled the short distance from the schools with predominantly Black pupils to the all-white schools comparing all these indicators and finds that conditions are polar opposites.

Ghetto schools have huge overcrowded classes.

Wealthy schools have classes half the size. Poor schools do not have enough books to go around and the books are old and outdated. Wealthy schools have plenty of new books for all. Poor high schools have one counselor for several hundred to a thousand students. Wealthy schools have one counselor for 150 students. Poor schools lack showers, goal posts, basketball hoops, etc. Wealthy schools have it all, including swimming pools, several sports fields and many physical education teachers. Wealthy schools have large numbers of computers, microscopes, and well-equipped labs for science learning. Poor schools have few to none.

How can it be that in a so-called; "democracy with liberty and justice for all," such gross inequities exist? Kozol blames the wealthy. They make sure that the decks are stacked against properly funding and desegregating the schools and, in the process, lavishly funding the schools attended by their children.

Firsthand experience

I have seen how this works firsthand. I teach in a working class community located within the wealthiest county in the country. I have the state maximum—33 children in my kindergarten class.

Most of the classes in the school I teach in are at the maximum size level. Playground equipment is at a minimum. The instrumental music program was just cut from the elementary schools altogether. There are no teachers for the arts (music, drama, dance, visual arts). The wealthy suburbs to the south of my district, however, have all these things and more. In short, the wealthier the parents—the better the schools for the kids.

The inequality in the public schools is a real indicator of what kind of a "democracy" we have in this country. Even other industrialized capitalist countries provide equal funding for all their public schools. The wealthy have blocked that possibility here by their manipulations of school funding systems—mainly through the use of local property taxes.

Kozol shows how even states that have ruled against funding inequities have been unable (or unwilling) to implement their own rulings due to loopholes created by and for the rich to insure separate and unequal schools.

This is all the more reason to remove them and their government from having any power over our lives and the lives of our children. If the lives and well-being of its children are a good indicator of a society's basic health, and I think they are, we surely live in a very sick society. Jonathan Kozol's book proves it in a most powerful way.

Young women in California won a major pro-choice victory on May 27, 1992, when Superior Court Judge Maxine Chesney struck down as unconstitutional a law that required minors to obtain their parent's consent before getting an Judge Chesney ruled that the privacy provisions of California's state constitution protects minors as well as people over age 18.

This is a very important victory for young women. In states where parental consent/notification laws are in force, young women have already died and suffered other tragedies. The best-known case is that of 17-year-old Becky Bell from Illinois. In 1989 she had an illegal abortion because she could not tell her parents about her pregnancy. She died. Her family is actively campaigning against these parental consent laws to save the lives of other young women.

Another young woman, Spring Adams, was murdered by her father, who had raped and impregnated her. She sought an abortion with the help of her mother, but was shot to death by her father when he found out. These cases point out the horrifying absurdity of such laws.

Parental consent laws also put young women at risk by forcing them to delay abortions until later in the pregnancy, when they are more dangerous. Young women who are not able to tell their parents must go through a complicated judicial bypass procedure which can often take weeks.

Judge Chesney's ruling striking down California's version of these heinous laws comes in the context of the United States Supreme Court's reconsideration of all women's fundamental right to abortion.- C.S

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SI ROSS PEROT alienation had been registered only indirect-

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Parental consent laws overturned in Calif.