Jonathan Kozol has been around for quite some time writing

Jonathan Kozol has been about for quite a some succession writing hard-hitting news media about flaws in this country. His book Savage Inequities is more(prenominal) than than of the same with the focus on training. Kozols strength as a writer is being able to coiffure a face on his topic, anyw present from rendering to home littleness, etc. He makes the issue real and attaches human being faces and real people that the subscriber can partake to.In club to write this book, Kozol spent a lot of time traveling around view instructs. To name a few, he visited initiates in saucily York City, Chicago, St. Louis, Washington D.C. and galore(postnominal) others.During his visits, he spent time observing in the classroom as soundly as interviewing teachers, students, p atomic number 18nts, and administrators. What Kozol found out was that schools today be as separate and unequal as they were forward the landmark decision of Brown vs. the Board of k at one timeledge in 1954. he determines that the reason for these inequities lies in the carriage that the Statesn schools ar parentageed. America funds its schools with airplane propeller taskes. The problem with this is that rich suburban field of honors pay very oft more property taskes, which makes their schools unrivaled. While in home(a) metropolis schools, the property tax base is much lour. Therefore, mostly minority kids attend schools without much currency.Kozol takes the contri moreoveror into these schools to make his point. In Chicago, there is a school with no library. They are overcrowded, understaffed, and lack rase the rudiments of resources and equipments. He takes us to a high school in the Bronx where the rain pours in. For example, Kozol states, The science labs at atomic number 99 St. Louis High are 30 to 50 long time outdatedThe six lab stations in the room have empty holes where pipes were once attached. It would be great if we had water, says a physics teacher (Kozol 27). He later hits the reader hard questioning wherefore our country solelyows this to happen. Almost any star who visits in the schools of East St. Louiscomes onward profoundly shaken.These are innocent children, after all(a)One searches fro some charge to understand wherefore a society as rich and, frequently, as generous as ours would leave these children in their want and squalor for so long-and with so little popular indignation. Is this just a strange mistake of chronicle?why is it that we cant at least pour extensive amounts of money, ingenuity, and talent into public genteelness for these children? (140).He literally bombards the reader with real horror stories of his visits and travels in tack to put a face on the silly state of education. It isnt just about education and schools and teachers there are real kids involved here who are non getting what they deficiency.Of Patterson, spic-and-span Jersey, he states,The metropolis is so short of space th at four-spot main(a) schools now occupy abandoned factories. Children at one wood-frame elementary school, which has no cafeteria or indoor(prenominal) space for recreation, eat lunch in a section of the boiler room. A bathroom houses read classes (Kozol 106).He compares these schools to suburban ones where conditions are much better. Teachers are paid much more, libraries are stocked, and technology abounds. He does a fantastic job at present the contrasts between the wealthy schools and the poor schools. With the pictures he paints for the reader, the reader can non argue with him. He also makes a plea for America to hold dear comparability and arrange its schools.And unless we stop to tell ourselves These are Americans. Why do we reduce them to this beggary and why, particularly, in public education? Why not spend on children here at least what we would be investing in their education if they lived within a wealthy regularise like Winnetka, Illinois, or Cherry Hill, New Jersey, or Manhasset, Rye, or Great Neck in New York? Wouldnt this be natural behavior in an pissed society that seems to value fairness in so many other areas of life? Is fairness less important to Americans today than in some preferably times? Is it viewed as slightly tiresome and clashing with hardnosed values? What do Americans believe about e feature? (Kozol 41)Kozol ends the book with a vivid picture of an elementary school in a neighborhood of Cincinnati. He tells the reader that atmosphere was polluted with factories, prostitutes were near, and Bleakness was the order of the day. Kozol said he rarely saw a child with a good big grimace (Kozol 230-31). He leaves the reader with a bad admiration in his/her mouth at the state of schools. This he does in hopes of spurring his readers to action.His research methods would be exposit as informal because his analysis comes from observations and interviews. There is no standard form that he uses, but he gets the materi al nonetheless. He devotes a chapter to teach area he discusses and bring forths the reader a description of the city as to understand why the schools are the itinerary they are.His findings are extremely significant to America as he clearly delineates the problems of American schools. With the images he creates, no one can argue with him. The pictures of these upcountry city schools are bleak.A reflection for Kozol is that he does not concentrate on any other problems in education besides inequality. Not that the inequality of schools is not a huge problem, but there are other problems that lead to poor accomplishment as well. No Child Left Behind plays a role. If those kids dont do well on the tests, more living can be cut. Inner city schools do not tend to keep their teachers, With high teacher turnover, it is even harder for students to learn, and there may be king-sized gaps in curriculum. There are also many forces at play outside the school, such as the home lives and p arental involvement of these students. Probably the biggest criticism of Kozol is that he offers no solutions he only identifies problems. He would probably say that solutions arent his job, and he would leave that to the educational theorists. But after reading his condemnations, it would be decent to hear some of his ideas for solutions.Kozol doesnt tell the reader this, but The relationship between funding and academic achievement is unclear. However, it does not take a genius to go in this out. Will more money alone answer the problems in schools? Of course, it wont. However, more money will help. silver will help schools fix dilapidated buildings, purchase equipment and resources, hire more teachers and aides to promote lower class sizes, attract better teachers who are more qualified, and a myriad of other things. But throwing money at the problem is only a start. These schools lack help. They need more community and parental involvement.They need after school programs a nd tutoring programs and teachers with the knowledge and compassion to expect in the profession. Kozol doesnt mention other solutions except to give the schools more money, but there are many other things needed. Even money will not solve the problems of segregation. Inner city schools are do up mostly of minority students. How is that problem solve? Yes, more whites who fled to the suburbs are finding their way pole to the inner city, but this is not always a good thing either. They are uprooting established communities in the process of gentrification and displacing people who may have nowhere else to go. This is why Kozol focuses on the money, because as difficult as it will be to change the way we fund schools, it will be harder to desegregate communities.Kozol makes good awareness when he speaks of getting rid of the property tax funding for schools and finding a new way to fund them. If education is supposed to be democratic, and it is, America cannot continue to fund sch ools this way. The system America has close to guarantees that parents who can afford to buy big houses in the suburbs will send their children to better schools.For school administrators and all personnel in schools, there are many things to be learned from this book. the most important one is that as educators, we should be fighting for democratic schools. Administrators should be out there fighting the property tax system and leading the charge to find other, more equitable ways to fund schools. Administrators also ought to be required to take a look around at the world. They should be required to visit inner city schools to truly understand what other educators go through on a daily basis. Administrators should value quality teachers all the more after reading this book, and go out of their way to keep their quality teachers.Truly, everyone even thinking about becoming an educator should read a book like this, and visit these schools. Most of us do not even know what a crisis we are in, right now in America. And hopefully, future educators will be the ones to fix this crisis.Work CitedKozol, Jonathan, Savage Inequities, Harper Perennial, 1992.