180 Quotes by Jonathan Kozol
- Author Jonathan Kozol
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Hypersegregated inner-city schools – in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 – are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.
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- Author Jonathan Kozol
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I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: ‘Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn’t know that. Let’s go out and fix it.’
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- Author Jonathan Kozol
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People rarely speak of children; you hear of ‘cohort groups’ and ‘standard variations,’ but you don’t hear much of boys who miss their cats or 6-year-olds who have to struggle with potato balls.
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- Author Jonathan Kozol
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Equity, after all, does not mean simply equal funding. Equal funding for unequal needs is not equality.
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- Author Jonathan Kozol
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If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there’s no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.
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- Author Jonathan Kozol
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Now, I don’t expect what I write to change things. I think I write now simply as a witness. This is how it is. This is what we have done. This is what we have permitted.
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- Author Jonathan Kozol
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I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be ‘fixed’ – I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engines – ever asks the opinions of teachers.
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- Author Jonathan Kozol
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East St. Louis-which the local press refers to as “an inner city without an outer city”-has some of the sickest children in America. Of 66 cities in Illinois, East St. Louis ranks first in fetal death, first in premature birth, and third in infant health.
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- Author Jonathan Kozol
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Turning in his seat, he gestures at the street and shrugs. “If you don’t, as an American, begin to give these kids the kind of education that you give the kids of Donald Trump, you’re asking for disaster.
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