SAVAGE INEQUALITIES

JONATHAN KOZOL

Most academic studies of school finance, sooner or later, ask us to consider the same question: 'How can we achieve more equity in education in America?" A variation of the question is a bit more circumspect: “How can we achieve both equity and excellence in education?" Both questions, however, seem to value equity as a desired goal. But, when the recommendations of such studies are examined, and when we look as well at the solutions that innumerable commissions have proposed, we realize that they do not quite mean 'equity" and that they have seldom asked for 'equity." What they mean, what they prescribe, is something that resembles equity but never reaches it: something close enough to equity to silence criticism by approximating justice, but far enough from equity to guarantee the benefits enjoyed by privilege. The differences are justified by telling us that equity must always be "approximate" and cannot possibly be perfect. But the imperfection falls in almost every case to the advantage of the privileged.

In Maryland, for instance, one of several states in which the courts have looked at fiscal inequalities between school districts, an equity suit filed in 1978, although unsuccessful, led the state to reexamine the school funding system. When a task force set up by the governor offered its suggestions five years later, it argued that 100 percent equality was too expensive. The goal, it said, was 75 percent equality-meaning that the poorest districts should be granted no less than three quarters of the funds at the disposal of the average district. But, as the missing 25 percent translates into differences of input (teacher pay, provision of books, class size, etc.), we discover it is just enough to demarcate the difference between services appropriate to different social classes, and to formalize that difference in their destinies.

"The equalized 75 percent," says an educator in one of the state's low income districts, 'buys just enough to keep all ships afloat. The unequal 25 percent assures that they will sail in opposite directions."

It, is a matter of national pride that every child's ship be kept afloat. Otherwise our nation would be subject to the charge that we deny poor children public school. But what is now encompassed by the one word ('school") are two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance and intention, serve entirely different roles. Both are needed for our nation’s governance. But children in one set of schools are educated to be governors; children in the other set of schools are trained for being governed. The former are given the imaginative range to mobilize ideas for economic growth; the latter are provided with the discipline to do the narrow tasks the first group will prescribe.

Societies cannot be all generals, no soldiers. But, by our schooling patterns, we assure that soldiers' children are more likely to be soldiers and that the offspring of the generals will have at least the option to be generals. If this is not so, if it is just a matter of the difficulty of assuring perfect fairness, why does the unfairness never benefit the children of the poor?

“Children in a true sense," writes John Coons of Berkeley University, are all poor" because they are dependent on adults. There is also, he says, la sameness among children in the sense of [a] substantial uncertainty about their potential role as adults." It could be expressed, he says, 'as an equality of innocence." The equality of adults, by comparison, "is always problematical; even social and economic differences among them are plausibly ascribed to their own deserts.... In any event, adults as a class enjoy no presumption of homogeneous virtue and their ethical demand for equality of treatment is accordingly attenuated. The differences among children, on the other hand, cannot be ascribed even vaguely to fault without indulging in an attaint of blood uncongenial to our time."

Terms such as "attaint of blood" are rarely used today, and, if they were, they would occasion public indignation; but the rigging of the game and the acceptance, which is nearly universal, of uneven laying fields reflect a dark unspoken sense that other people's children are of less inherent value than our own. Now and then, in private, affluent suburbanites concede that certain aspects of the game may be a trifle rigged to their advantage. "Sure, it's a bit unjust," they may concede, 'but that's reality and that's the way the game is played....

“In any case," they sometimes add in a refrain that we have heard now many times, 'there's no real evidence that spending money makes much difference in the outcome of a child's education. We have it. So we spend it. But it's probably a secondary matter. Other factors-family and background seem to be a great deal more important."

In these ways they fend off dangers of disturbing introspection; and this, in turn, enables them to give their children something far more precious than the simple gift of pedagogic privilege. They give them uncontaminated satisfaction in their victories. Their children learn to shut from mind the possibility that they are winners in an unfair race, and they seldom let themselves lose sleep about the losers. There are, of course, unusual young people who, no matter what their parents tell them, do become aware of the inequities at stake. We have heard the voices of a few such students. But the larger numbers of these favored children live with a remarkable experience of ethical exemption. Cruelty is seldom present in the thinking of such students, but it is contained within insouciance.

Sometimes the residents of affluent school districts point to certain failings in their own suburban schools, as if to say that 'all our schools" are rather unsuccessful" and that "minor differentials" between urban and suburban schools may not therefore be of much significance. "You know," said the father of two children who had gone to school in Great Neck, 'it isn't just New York. We have our problems on Long Island too. My daughter had some high school teachers who were utterly inept and uninspired. She has had a devil of a time at Sarah Lawrence. . . .' He added that she had friends who went to private school and who were given a much better preparation. "It just seems terribly unfair," he said.

Defining unfairness as the difficulty that a Great Neck graduate encounters at a topflight private college, to which any child in the South Bronx would have given her right arm to be admitted, strikes one as a way of rendering the term so large that it means almost nothing. "What is unfair," he is saying in effect, "is what I determine to be unfair. What I find unfair is what affects my child, not somebody else's child in New York."

Competition at the local high school, said another Great Neck parent, was 'unhealthy." He described the toll it took on certain students. 'Children in New York may suffer from too little. Many of our children suffer from too much." The loss of distinctions in these statements serves to blur the differences between the inescapable unhappiness of being human and the needless misery created by injustice. It also frees the wealthy from the obligation to concede the difference between inconvenience and destruction.

Poor people do not need to be reminded that the contest is unfair. "My children,' says Elizabeth, a friend of mine who lives in a black neighborhood of Boston, "know very well the system is unfair. They also know that they are living in a rich society. They see it on TV, and in advertisements, and in the movies. They see the president at his place in Maine, riding around the harbor in his motor boat and playing golf with other wealthy men. They know that men like these did not come out of schools in Roxbury or Harlem. They know that they were given something extra. They doiyt know exactly what it is, but they have seen enough, and heard enough, to know that men don't speak like that and look like that unless they have been fed with silver spoons-and went to schools that had a lot of silver spoons and other things that cost a lot....

'So they know this other world exists, and, when you tell them that the government can't find the money to provide them with a decent place to go to school, they don't believe it and they know that it's a choice that has been made-a choice about how much they matter to society. They see it as a message: 'This is to tell you that you don’t much matter. You are ugly to us so we crowd you into ugly places. You are dirty so it will not hurt to pack you into dirty places.' My son says this: 'By doing this to you, we teach you how much you are hated.' I like to listen to the things my children say. They're not sophisticated so they speak out of their hearts."

One of the ideas, heard often in the press, that stirs the greatest sense of anger in a number of black parents that I know is that the obstacles black children face, to the extent that 'obstacles" are still conceded, are attributable, at most, to "past injustice" something dating maybe back to slavery or maybe to the era of official segregation that came to its close during the years from 1954 to 1968-but not, in any case, to something recent or contemporary or ongoing. The nostrum of a 'past injustice"-an expression often spoken with sarcasm-is particularly cherished by conservatives because it serves to undercut the claim that young black people living now may have some right to preferential opportunities. Contemporary claims based on a 'past injustice," after all, begin to seem implausible if the alleged injustice is believed to be a generation, or six generations, in the past. 'We were not alive when these injustices took place,' white students say. 'Some of us were born to parents who came here as immigrants. None of these things are our responsibility, and we should not be asked to suffer for them.' But the hundreds of classrooms without teachers in Chicago's public schools, the thousands of children without classrooms in the schools of Irvington and Paterson and East Orange, the calculated racial segregation of the children in the skating rink in District 10 in New York City, and the lifelong poisoning of children in the streets and schools of East St. Louis are not matters of anterior injustice. They are injustices of 1991.

Over 30 years ago, the city of Chicago purposely constructed the high-speed Dan Ryan Expressway in such a way as to cut off the section of the city in which housing projects for black people had been built. The Robert Taylor Homes, served by Du Sable High, were subsequently constructed in that isolated area as well; realtors thereafter set aside adjoining neighborhoods for rental only to black people. The expressway is still there. The projects are still there. Black children still grow up in the same neighborhoods. There is nothing "past" about most 'past discrimination" in Chicago or in any other northern city.

In seeking to find a metaphor for the unequal contest that takes place in public school, advocates for equal education sometimes use the image of a tainted sports event. We have seen, for instance, the familiar image of the playing field that isn't level. Unlike a tainted sports event, however, a childhood cannot be played again. We are children only once; and, after those few years are gone, there is no second chance to make amends. In this respect, the consequences of unequal education have a terrible finality. Those who are denied cannot be "made whole' by a later act of government. Those who get the unfair edge cannot be later stripped of what they've won. Skills, once attained-no matter how unfairly take on a compelling aura. Effectiveness seems irrefutable, no matter how acquired. The winners in this race feel meritorious. Since they also are, in large part, those who govern the discussion of this issue, they are not disposed to cast a cloud upon the means of their ascent. People like Elizabeth are left disarmed. Their only argument is justice. But justice, poorly argued, is no match for the acquired ingenuity of the successful. The fruits of inequality, in this respect, are self-confirming.

There are 'two worlds of Washington,' the Wall Street journal writes. One is the Washington of I cherry blossoms, the sparkling white monuments, the magisterial buildings of government . . . , of politics and power.' In the Rayburn House Office Building, the Journal writes, 'a harpist is playing Schumann's 'Traumetei,' the bartenders are tipping the top brands of Scotch, and two huge salmons sit on mirrored platters." Just over a mile away, the other world is known as Anacostia.

In an elementary school in Anacostia, a little girl in the fifth grade tells me that the first thing she would do if somebody gave money to her school would be to plant a row of flowers by the street. 'Blue flowers," she says. 'And I'd buy some curtains for my teacher." And she specifies again: "Blue curtains."

I ask her, "Why blue curtains?"

'It's like this," she says. 'The school is dirty. There isn't any playground. There's a hole in the wall behind the principal's desk. What we need to do is first rebuild the school. Another color. Build a playground. Plant a lot of flowers. Paint the classrooms. Blue and white. Fix the hole in the principal's office. Buy doors for the toilet stalls in the girls' bathroom. Fix the ceiling in this room. It looks like somebody went up and peed over our heads. Make it a beautiful clean building. Make it pretty. Way it is, I feel ashamed."

Her name is Tunisia. She is tall and thin and has big glasses with red frames, "When people come and see our school," she says, 'they don’t say nothing, but I know what they are thinking."

"Our teachers,' says Octavia, who is tiny with red sneakers and two beaded cornrows in her hair, "shouldn’t have to eat here in the basement. I would like for them to have a dining room. A nice room with a salad bar. Serve our teachers big thick steaks to give them energy.'

A boy named Gregory tells me that he was visiting in Fairfax County on the weekend. 'Those neighborhoods are different," Gregory reports. 'They got a golf course there. Big houses. Better schools."

I ask him why he thinks they're better schools.

'We don’t know why," Tunisia says. 'We are too young to have the information."

'You live in certain areas and things are different,' Gregory explains.

Not too long ago, the basement cafeteria was flooded. Rain poured into the school and rats appeared. Someone telephoned the mayor: 'You've got dead rats here in the cafeteria."

The principal is an aging, slender man. He speaks of generations of black children lost to bitterness and failure. He seems worn down by sorrow and by anger at defeat. He has been the principal since 1959.

'How frustrating it is," he says, 'to see so many children going hungry. On Fridays in the cafeteria I see small children putting chicken nuggets in their pockets. They're afraid of being hungry on the weekend.'

A teacher looks out at her class: 'These children don't smile. Why should they learn when their lives are so hard and so unhappy?"

Seven children meet me in the basement cafeteria. The flood that brought the rats is gone, but other floods have streaked the tiles in the ceiling.

The school is on a road that runs past several boarded buildings. Gregory tells me they are called "pipe" houses. 'Go by there one day-it be vacant, Next day, they bring sofas, chairs. Day after that, you see the junkies going in."

I ask the children what they'd do to get rid of the drugs.

"Get the New Yorkers off our streets," Octavia says. "They come here from New York, perturbed, and sell our children drugs.'

"Children working for the dealers," Gregory explains.

A teacher sitting with us says, 'At eight years old, some of the boys are running drugs and holding money for the dealers. By 28, they're going to be dead."

Tunisia:"It makes me sad to see black people kill black people."

'Four years from now," the principal says when we sit down to talk after the close of school, 'one third of the little girls in this fifth grade are going to be pregnant."

I look into the faces of these children. At this moment they seem full of hope and innocence and expectation, The little girls have tiny voices and they squirm about on little chairs and lean way forward with their elbows on the table and their noses just above the table's surface and make faces at each other and seem mischievous and wise and beautiful. Two years from now, in junior high, there may be more toughness in their eyes, a look of lessened expectations and increased cynicism. By the time they are 14, a certain rawness and vulgarity may have set in. Many will be hostile and embittered by that time. Others will coarsen, partly the result of diet, partly self-neglect and self-dislike. Visitors who meet such girls in elementary school feel tenderness; by junior high, they feel more pity or alarm.