So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage. – Jonathan Kozol
In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable. – Jonathan Kozol
I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature. – Jonathan Kozol
We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals. No, I refuse to pretend the problem is insufficient knowledge. We lack the theological will to do it. – Jonathan Kozol
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. – Jonathan Kozol
No Child Left Behind’s fourth-grade gains aren’t learning gains, they’re testing gains. That’s why they don’t last. The law is a distraction from things that really count. – Jonathan Kozol
Congress has an opportunity to take advantage of the opening created by Justice Kennedy later this year when it reauthorizes the federal No Child Left Behind Act. – Jonathan Kozol
When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement. – Jonathan Kozol
I believe we need a national amendment which will guarantee every child in America the promise of not just an equal education but a high-quality equal education. – Jonathan Kozol
The fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome, but surely does not give it any greater legitimacy. – Jonathan Kozol
The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society. – Jonathan Kozol
I think a lot of people don’t have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students. – Jonathan Kozol
Our nation’s oldest sin and deepest crime is the isolation of minority children – black children, in particular – in schools that are not only segregated but shamefully unequal. – Jonathan Kozol
We are now operating a school system in America that’s more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King. – Jonathan Kozol
The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail. – Jonathan Kozol
Governor Romney has said nothing about preschool. I think that giving the poorest kids in America wonderful preschool, and three years of it, starting when they are two-and-a-half, is absolutely crucial. – Jonathan Kozol
I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima; 60 percent were either ten years old or older. – Jonathan Kozol
A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest. – Jonathan Kozol
An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there’s no longer segregation in America’s schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true. – Jonathan Kozol
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. – Jonathan Kozol
I think a moment of critical energy has suddenly emerged. But moments like this come and go unless we seize them at their height. – Jonathan Kozol
President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams. – Jonathan Kozol
We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals. – Jonathan Kozol
I don’t know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children. – Jonathan Kozol
Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There’s a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession – and I don’t find that to be true at all. – Jonathan Kozol
The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory. – Jonathan Kozol