Jonathan Kozol fought against school inequality for decades. Here’s one final plea.

There are certain motifs in Jonathan Kozol’s half-century of writing about America’s failure to adequately educate poor black and Hispanic children, which began with “Death at an Early Age,” a blistering account of his year teaching at Boston Public Schools.

Dilapidated school buildings with dirty bathrooms and leaky ceilings. Students dumbfounded by scripted curricula and endless exam preparation. Gloomy city neighborhoods with neglected parks, crumbling apartments and harried, underpaid teachers. The desperation is punctuated by bright and lively children, who bluntly notice the obvious unfairness that adults have taught themselves to overlook.

‘Death at an Early Age’, published in 1967, made him the kind of widely read public intellectual that is hardly present anymore.

Now, at 87, he has published An End to Inequality, his fifteenth book – and his last, he says. It is an unapologetic cri de coeur about the shortcomings of the schools that serve poor black and Hispanic children, and thus about the nation’s moral inability to end the inequality he has documented for decades.

Critics have long said that Mr. Kozol has focused too much on everything that is wrong with American public education, and not enough on models for success. They point to the charter schools, charismatic principals and early reading programs that are creating change, even in some deeply segregated neighborhoods.

But Mr. Kozol characterizes these as marginal reforms designed to fit into a system that is inherently unequal. And in his long career, he has seen decades of national reform efforts — “A Nation at Risk,” “No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds” — come and go, while some problems remain largely the same.

Educational opportunities are still largely determined by parents’ ability to pay for housing in desired zip codes. Some aging school buildings are still laced with lead. Black and Latino students are still disproportionately subjected to harsh forms of discipline: quiet hallways, insulation cabinets, even physical disability.

“I will not tolerate forced optimism at this time,” Mr. Kozol said in an interview. “When we talk about Black and Latino children in our public schools, I think it’s unrealistic to be optimistic.”

He spoke from an armchair in the living room of his canary-yellow colonial home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lives alone, aided by several young assistants. He was briefly married and divorced in the 1970s, had no children and devoted years to compelling reporting. He spent his days in schools and homeless shelters, writing by hand late into the evening — still his favorite time to work, he said, sipping an iced coffee at dusk.

The room was full of teddy bears – he started collecting them when he became too weak to care for dogs – and old issues of left-wing magazines like The Nation and The Progressive. A nearby coffee table was covered with memorabilia intended for a possible acquisition of Mr. Kozol’s papers by the New York Public Library.

They include an autographed photo of Langston Hughes, which the poet sent in 1965, after Mr. Kozol, then 28, was fired for teaching a class of mostly black fourth-graders Mr. Hughes’ poem.Ballad of the Landlord‘—then considered a subversive work by Boston administrators.

In “An End to Inequality,” Mr. Kozol uses bold language to make his point.

He rejects the idea, popular in some education circles, that focusing on the problems of racially segregated public schools is tantamount to encouraging a kind of deficit thinking in which black, Latino and Native American children are regarded more for what they lack than for what they lack. for what makes them resilient.

“It is a delicate dilemma,” writes Mr Kozol. “If we cannot speak of victims, if the word is in disgrace, what other language can be used to speak of children who face cognitive oppression in almost every aspect of education?”

He continues: “If there are no victims, no crime has been committed. If no crime has been committed, there can be no reason to demand reparation for what these children suffer from sequestration in their schools. Avoiding an unfavorable word cannot erase reality.”

The solution, he argues, is still the yellow school bus, which transports poor children to opportunities in more affluent neighborhoods and cities, where they can learn alongside upper-middle-class peers and enjoy some of the benefits their parents provide for have secured for them: rich arts programs, foreign language classes, science labs, vibrant libraries.

The system we have now is nothing less than ‘apartheid’, writes Mr Kozol. The continued existence of lead paint and pipes in poor children’s schools is a “cerebral genocide,” he adds, and budget cuts are evidence of a “war on public schools.”

Mr. Kozol, who grew up the son of a doctor and a social worker in the affluent Boston suburb of Newton, credits Archibald MacLeish, the modernist poet who taught him at Harvard, with helping him develop his writing style.

“He encouraged me to use strong words,” he recalls. ‘There is a tendency to assume that the extremes of speech are always wrong, and that truth, by its own preference, likes to live in the middle. It doesn’t always live in the middle.”

After college and a stint as a failed novelist in Paris, Mr. Kozol had planned to pursue a Ph.D. in the literature.

His life changed in 1964, when civil rights activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Mississippi.

“What am I doing here,” he remembered thinking, “hanging out in Cambridge and talking about the metaphysical poetry of John Donne?”

Soon after, he taught in Roxbury, a predominantly black neighborhood in Boston, and organized with parents who wanted to enroll their children in higher-quality schools, first in Boston and eventually in the suburbs.

Their activism helped create a voluntary busing program called METCOwhich still exists and transports 3,000 students annually from Boston to suburban schools. Research shows that students who are admitted to the program achieve higher test scores and have better academic and career outcomes than students who apply to METCO but do not win a spot in the randomized lottery.

The big idea in Mr. Kozol’s new book is a massive federal and state investment — “reparations” — to expand voluntary bus programs like METCO. Another model is voluntary roundtrip transit, which uses thematic magnet schools to attract middle-class students. to poorer neighborhoods, freeing up seats in middle-class schools for low-income children.

While Mr. Kozol is anything but dry, his understanding of education research has always been careful and rigorous, says Gary Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, an institute that provides data on the survival of the segregation of schools by race and class.

Dr. Orfield credited Mr. Kozol with not being distracted by the kind of technocratic school reforms often favored by politicians, such as increasing high-stakes testing.

“He’s just ruthless,” said Dr. Orfield. “He is angry and offended by the reality that he continues to see. And no one cares.”

Mr. Kozol is far from the only voice asking the nation to refocus on school segregation and inequality between rich and poor districts. Multiple new organizations in Washington are committed to these issues and have attracted influential supporters.

But Mr. Kozol is baffled that mainstream Democrats rarely support major investments in school desegregation. And he said he is not interested in other forms of school choice, such as charters or vouchers, which also help low-income students escape underperforming schools. Like many traditional liberals, he views these options as financial leeches for the public school system and is skeptical of their support from Republicans and conservatives.

He started writing An End to Inequality before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the book barely mentions how the crisis upended education politics as schools in the country’s most liberal cities were closed for the longest , while low-income students of color ranked even lower. further behind.

Nor does he address the fact that in the wake of the pandemic, parents — including some of those he cares most about — have become more probably to support school choice.

This omission irritates some education activists, even those who admire Mr. Kozol.

“You can’t pay reparations to the system that has harmed people,” said Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, a group that supports the expansion of charter schools and vouchers. “You have to give it to the people the system has harmed.”

But Mr. Kozol sticks to the traditional idea of ​​public education: one system for all. “A democratic nation needs a truly democratic, well-funded public school system,” he said.

There was a framed picture on a table next to his armchair drawing, now faded, of a sun peeking over the horizon. The artist, Pineapple, was a tenacious girl who appears in several of his books, describing the trials of growing up in the South Bronx in the wake of the crack and AIDS epidemics.

“I asked her, ‘Does the sun rise or set?” Mr. Kozol recalled. “And she looked at me and said, ‘You decide.’”