Savage Inequalities

Safir Ahmed is a reporter for the Post-Dispatch who has written about East St. Louis for years. He details its economic and social isolation and the city’s role as a dumping ground for the surrounding chemical companies. He describes the difference in segregation between the predominately Black East St. Louis and the predominately white St. Louis.

Irl Solomon is a history teacher at East St. Louis High. Other than textbooks, he pays for all the supplementary materials and media his students use. His students, he relates to the author, are candid and lucid about their own diminished expectations and opportunities; a discussion held in class goes as far as to explain how the dumping by chemical plants near where they live is a metaphor for their place in the system at large—the very metaphor Kozol uses to introduce the section.

Reverend Jim Wolff is the head of a mission church in North Lawndale, an underserved Chicago neighborhood. He describes the community's deteriorating socioeconomic situation through the departure of large companies: Sears, International Harvester, Sunbeam, and Western Electric. This coincides with the arrival of gangs: The Vice Lords, the Disciples, and Latin Kings. He remarks that though the turmoil and pain of the neighborhood seems to refine some of its people, its "hellishness" simply ruins most.

Corla Hawkins teaches a combined class of fifth and sixth graders at Bethune Elementary School in North Lawndale. When Kozol arrives at her class, she is cradling an infant; he learns it not hers, but that of her classroom assistant. Her classroom is lively and energetic. In addition to subjects such as mathematics, social studies, art, and reading, she provides lessons in "self-motivation" and "self-esteem." However, teachers like her are in short supply, as the school district opts to hire substitutes on a rotating basis. This, as Ms. Hawkins explains, harms the children.

James Carter is the principal of P.S 79, an elementary school in the Bronx. His school is over 50% overcrowded. As such, he lacks the space to make meaningful reductions to class size. When Kozol prompts him with the argument that class size doesn't matter, he explains how overcrowding precludes other essentials: a computer lab, a gymnasium, and a library. He is otherwise blunt in his assessment of the role of race in inequality. Gesturing at a ceiling plugged with garbage bags, he remarks that this "would not happen to white children."

Alexander is a 16-year-old student at Morris High School in the Bronx. His parents are immigrants from Jamaica. He joins in on a discussion on inequality in education. In this discussion, Alexander argues that the advantages the children of richer parents enjoy—their "inheritance," he calls it—will eventually be treated like rights. He goes on to say that these children will more than likely want to preserve these same advantages for their own children.

Jennifer is a student in suburban Rye, New York. Her family is from the Bronx. She explains that one of the reasons her parents moved out was for better schools. She doesn't believe that she should have the responsibility to pay, with increased taxes, for schools in that area. Instead, she believes that the parents must act to help the fortunes of their own children, as her own parents did for her. While an outlier in the context of the discussion, Jennifer's views are easily understood and accepted by her peers.

Ruthie Green-Brown is the principal of Camden High School. She speaks about the "catch-up" game in education. Part of what hampers students' fortunes, she remarks, is the necessity to "teach to the test"; that is, to organize curriculums according to standardized tests. This necessity of teaching to tests, she argues, has a negative effect on student outcomes further down the road. Principal Green-Brown is frustrated by the testing-based reforms' superficial approach, believing that it spoils students' ability to learn concepts and frameworks in the present, while still preparing them for failure at the university level.

Chilly is the nickname of a young girl of Cambodian descent who attends East Orange High School in Camden, New Jersey. She struggles with her English. In a discussion in class, she relates her experience with a school counselor who advises her not to try to study law, her desired goal, encouraging her instead to choose something easier. She says that this experience, among others, has dampened the hopes she had before arriving from Cambodia. The other students support her, sharing their own experiences of diminished expectations and detachment.

Delabian Rice-Thurston is an urban planner whose children go to public school in Washington, DC. While visiting schools for her own children, she described a long list of unsightly, unsanitary, and otherwise decrepit conditions: holes in the ceiling, filthy bathrooms, and boarded-up windows. She is uncommonly blunt, believing that the desire of white suburban parents to keep Black children away from their own precipitates the inequity in public schooling. Those who stay, she adds, are swayed by the promise of magnet schools, which create multiple curriculums, or "tracks," within one school. She believes this process to be altogether negative for student outcomes.

Harper is a young girl from the Washington, DC, neighborhood of Anacostia. Kozol meets her in a housing project. Her age is never given, but it is assumed she is 9 or 10. She is engaging and talkative. In talking to her, Kozol uses stock questions, but she and her friends quickly shift the conversation to drugs; she describes some of the local addicts in curious, sad language. Her mother explains that she and the others are exposed to these kind of things from an early age. While the older children are more sullen and reserved, the young children do not understand, and repeat whatever they hear and see.

In 1968, Demetrio Rodriguez was a resident in the Edgewood neighborhood of San Antonio, Texas. That year, Rodriguez became part of class-action lawsuit that alleged that the funding scheme for his and other Texas districts was unconstitutional, as it failed to provide equal rights and opportunities for those in poorer districts. Their argument was that the unequal education of their children took away their ability to exercise other rights, namely the 1st Amendment. The source of their debate was the difference in spending levels. For Rodriguez, the argument was simply about fairness—to him, his children were being punished simply for being poorer than other children. It is only by 1989, when his class-action lawsuit is finally upheld, that he sees the beginning of the end of this inequity.