Jonathan Kozol Quotes on Education (13 Quotes)

I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.

Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.

In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.

I'd love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I'd love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.

More mony is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children We are going to build alot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.

These are children whom this nation does not truly value and of whom, despite our president's rhetoric of 'high expectations,' we in fact expect so little that we will not let them go to the same schools our white children attend. The kind of schooling that we give to children is the most important determinant of their future options in life.

Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don't think it works that way, and I've been watching this for a longtime.

The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.

If we allow public funds to be used to support our relatively benign, morally grounded schools, we will have to allow those public funds to be used for any type of private school.

During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed.

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.

There's a reason why politicians and the pedagogic establishment keep churning out these lists of new 'how to fix it' plans. It's because they don't dare speak about the central point. It is not that we don't know what works in public education.... All we have to do is go out and visit Glencoe, Ill., Scarsdale, N.Y., or any of the wealthiest districts in California and we find out right away.

Let's concede that we have decided to let our children grow up in two separate nations, and lead two separate kinds of lives. If, on the other hand, we have the courage to rise to this challenge to name what's happening within our inner-city schools, then we also need the courage to be activist and go out and fight like hell to change it.