Author Wants These Children’s Lives to Be a Lesson to Us

The next time you fly into New York’s LaGuardia Airport, look out the right side of the plane, and as the wheels touch the runway, you’ll see Rikers Island, the largest penal colony in the country. Overflow from the barred ghetto, the population of which is 92% black and Hispanic, floats in the East River on a prison barge. A few miles to the north and west lies the South Bronx, America’s poorest congressional district, an area that makes war-ravaged Beirut look like a vacation spot.

This angle on the biggest and arguably most important city in the Western world displays New York not as a cultural and financial center but as the “shame of the nation,” a place where public schools are almost completely segregated and poor students are relegated to crowded, underfunded schools while many of their absent fathers are kept behind bars.

The tour guide and narrator of this Orwellian scenario is Jonathan Kozol, for more than 30 years a social critic and advocate for children’s rights. He looked down on Rikers Island on each of the more than 200 trips he took in the waning years of the ‘90s from his Massachusetts home to the South Bronx neighborhood of Mott Haven. A group of children just beginning elementary school there became the subject of his ninth and latest book, “Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope” (Crown Books, 2000).

“I think it’s the shame of the nation that the city that was once considered a bastion of humanitarian idealism has the most segregated and most unequal public schools in the United States,” Kozol said. With little provocation, he will launch into a low-volume rant on racism, misguided stereotyping of poor children, liberal hypocrisy, and the dashed dreams of altruistic Americans whose values were shaped by the 1960s. Dedicated teachers, heroic grandmothers or children who defy the morbid expectations society has for them can inspire equally impassioned monologues of praise.

“I feel a tension between hope and anger,” he continued. “The children I wrote about in my book are lucky because they have a good elementary school and a good church, run by two strong, charismatic women. They live on a hopeful little island. But what’s going to happen to them when they go on to high school and discover that this country really doesn’t like them very much?”

Society’s low regard for these children of color is evident when 50 of them are squeezed into classrooms with 30 desks, in schools where such amenities as computer labs, functioning plumbing and new books are nonexistent. The high school in Mott Haven, which Kozol calls “a bastion of apartheid,” has a freshman class of 1,000. Ninety will make it to 12th grade, and only 65 typically graduate.

It is difficult for many Americans to hear such statistics and remain unmoved. Waving his right fist in the air as if punching an unseen enemy, Kozol addressed an audience of several hundred at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival in late April, telling them that less than half the amount spent to educate a child in an affluent area is allocated in the South Bronx. Speaking at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple when he visited L.A. again in May, Kozol described how burning New York City’s trash in dumps in the South Bronx has created environmentally unhealthy neighborhoods plagued by an epidemic of pediatric asthma.

At every opportunity, Kozol will scold rich suburbanites and try to embarrass members of Congress. “When I go up to Capitol Hill, which I’ve done at least 30 times, I do everything in my power to shame the members of the House and Senate, whose own children are always in the most affluent school districts or go to the most expensive private schools,” he said. “Day schools in the East cost about $18,000 a year, and New England boarding schools cost about $31,000. They send their kids to these schools and then they ask me, ‘Jonathan, is money really the answer to public education?’ Or the typical question is, ‘Can you really buy a better education?’ And I always look them right in the eye and say, ‘It seems to work for your kid, doesn’t it?’ It is simply unacceptable, by any standard, including all our religious principles, to finance the education of a little girl in the South Bronx at less than $8,000 a year, while the children in an affluent suburb like Great Neck, Long Island, get $18,000 a year.”

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Given the facts, well-meaning people, including groups of college students Kozol often lectures to (many of whom were assigned to read his earlier books, “Amazing Grace” [Crown Books, 1995] or “Savage Inequalities” [Crown Books, 1991] in high school), will say, “What can we do?” Awakening people’s consciences gratifies Kozol, but only somewhat.

“After I write about these children in my books, certain of them will get a lot more attention than they’ve ever gotten before, because an awful lot of unselfish, decent people read my books and contact me and want to help,” he said. “Individuals will do wonderful things for the children I describe, but you cannot build a good society out of philanthropic interventions, because charity is too whimsical, it’s too accidental, and also, it depends on the power of a single child to catch your attention. Children shouldn’t have to charm us in order to get a fair deal in this country. They ought to get a fair deal just because they’re American. The real question is, what happens to all the kids that philanthropic people never hear about? If I have any effect on the destinies of the children I write about, it isn’t in the philanthropic gifts that people give, it’s in raising awareness of the need for transformations of public policy.”

He has been trying to do that for most of his adult life, and the amazing thing is that, given the slow pace of social change, he has not tired of the fight. Kozol explained, “If you spend a lot of your life with little kids, you get back as much energy as you give, because they constantly surprise you by their jubilant refusal to give up. Because the kids I know have such hard lives and still manage to strive, it makes me feel guilty if I fall into self-pity. The kids don’t let their obstacles get them down, so I don’t have the right to get discouraged either.”

Harvey J. Fields, senior rabbi at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, has known Kozol since 1963, when both were young men in Boston. “His parents are rather extraordinary people,” Fields said. “His mother is a person of great intellectual gumption and humanity. Both his parents were very much concerned with the big picture, and with how one could heal society. Like them, he has that wonderful belief that one person really can turn things around and can make a difference.”

After graduating from Harvard and winning a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, Kozol began teaching in segregated public elementary schools in Boston. Although he wasn’t a radical then, and didn’t even consider himself very political, he was fired for reading a Langston Hughes poem to fourth-graders. He described his first teaching experience in “Death at an Early Age,” which won the National Book Award. The title of “Ordinary Resurrections” is a refutation of his first book’s name. “These children do not die as easily as some of us believed,” he said.

Of medium height, with pale skin and thinning gray hair, he still calls himself “an old schoolteacher.” He is 67 now, and although he sometimes forgets his exact age or even, momentarily, what year it is, his memories of the late ‘60s, when social activism reached its apex, are vivid.

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“In 1967, there was a clear sense among poor people, especially black community organizers and parents and their white allies, that the government was on our side,” he said. President Lyndon Johnson had just launched the federal War on Poverty. Whatever its real gains, the symbolic value of an established policy to combat poverty was considerable.

“There was a profound confidence among all of us that the nation had definitively turned its back on segregation,” Kozol said. “That has died completely. Today, there is no part of the United States, except, ironically, the Old South, in which Brown vs. Board of Education has been genuinely enforced. I’ve found that in most of the major cities in the nation, even black leaders have given up on the dream.”

And yet, Kozol continues to leave the Boston suburb near the New Hampshire border where he lives with his dog and board the Delta shuttle to LaGuardia to spend time with the children of Mott Haven. His trips take him away from his parents, who, now in their 90s, have become increasingly frail. But he is determined that, through his books, the children will not be invisible. His exposure to them has taught him that the sociologists who advance complex theories about the poor and an American underclass that is destined to perpetuate itself really don’t know very much.

“None of the labels fit these kids,” he said. “The conditions of their lives are very different from those of wealthy children. But in their personalities, their mischievous sense of humor, their moral generosity, the candy bars they buy, the things they like to watch on television, they’re like kids everywhere in the United States. They aren’t all saints and angels. But they aren’t little predators either. It’s become politically acceptable to portray the children of the poor as though there’s a kind of inevitability in their failure based upon what are described as the inherent failures of their parents. Most of the liabilities that the poorest children I know undergo have nothing to do with the problems of their parents, they have to do with those structural injustices which we as a society impose upon them.”

One difference Kozol has noticed in the children of Mott Haven is that they are more religious than kids he’s met elsewhere. Forced to face his parents’ mortality, he was drawn to the children’s naive but fervent expressions of faith.

“It’s very funny the way the kids grill me because I’m Jewish and they aren’t,” he said. “They’re interested in that, but in 35 years that I’ve been working in mostly black and Hispanic communities, I’ve never run into a word of anti-Semitism. They brought me back to my own religion, in a way. When they talk about things unseen, I long to see them also. For me, it’s a case of wanting to believe, more than having belief itself.”

It would seem that a man who devotes his life to speaking for children who have no voice, who remains angry yet compassionate, would have a great deal of belief. In the jargon of the new century, that belief has shifted for Kozol from the macro to the micro.

“The healthiest thing for me in the past few years was putting all my politics aside, trying to shut the statistics out of my mind, and just enjoying the company of the children for long periods of time,” he said. “It sort of reminded me that most of life is not made up of big things, but of little details, of licorice sticks and lighted yo-yos. The details of life renew our faith.”

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Mimi Avins can be reached at [email protected].