THE REVIEW

 

 Epistolary in style if not in fact, Jonathan Kozol's Letters allows you to feel like a secret sharer in his correspondence with a first-year teacher named “Francesca,” to whom he divulges his keenly felt and occasionally combative views on the contemporary education scene. Most of the fifteen thematic “letters” concern issues particular to Francesca’s experiences teaching in an urban (Boston) elementary school setting but are broadly applicable to anyone new to the profession.

Many of Kozol’s letters attack myths put forth by an America in deep denial about the quality—and equality­—of the education afforded to racial minorities in urban public schools. According to Kozol, schools like Francesca’s have been allowed to slide backward in time, effectively returning to a divided, apartheid society in which the promises of the 1954 Brown and 1896 Plessy decisions have been turned into a “mockery.” It might be easy to dismiss these claims as just the invective of a leftist, Harvard intellectual, but Kozol’s facts are as damning as they are ideology-free. How can a child in a poor minority community like the South Bronx (per pupil spending $11,500) receive even roughly the same education as her counterparts in Bronxville (p.p.s. $19,000) or Manhasset (p.p.s. $22,000)? And why extol a curriculum, as one Kansas City administrator did to Kozol, that addresses “the needs of children from diverse backgrounds” in a school that is 99.6% black? As unjust as this all is, says Kozol, not telling children in urban schools the ugly truth is even worse. If they believe (as their textbooks tell them) that their schools are equal, what can these students attribute poor academic performance to except “an inherent defect in their character or cultural inheritance, a lack of will…or a deficit in their intelligence”?

Kozol is similarly tough on school vouchers (“the single worst, most dangerous idea to enter education discourse in my lifetime”), high-stakes standardized testing (for putting teachers into the role of “drill instructors for the state” and wasting time and resources on making “testing gains not learning gains”), educational jargon (where you can never simply “do,” “use,” or “start” but must “implement,” “utilize,” and “initiate”), and schools of education (“taken over by people, to a troubling degree, who have little knowledge of the classroom but are the technicians of a dry and mechanistic version of ‘proficiency and productivity’”). Despite all this, I don’t want to leave the impression that Letters is nothing but a screed. Some of its most affecting passages share Kozol’s own teaching experiences and joyful perspectives from Francesca, who is happy to be paid richly “in hugs” if not dollars. I myself was profoundly moved by Kozol’s criterion for the kinds of teachers he recruits (quoted below), which I find both inspirational and aspirational.

 

“The future teachers I try to recruit are those who refuse to let themselves be neutered…either in their private lives or in the lives that they intend to lead at school. When they begin to teach, they come into their classrooms with a sense of affirmation of the goodness and the fullness of existence, with a sense of satisfaction in discovering the unexpected in their students, and with a longing to surprise the world, their kids, even themselves with their capacity to leave each place they’ve been (a school, a classroom, a community of learning) a better and more joyful place than it was when they entered it.”