Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Thursday, January 19, 2006
Is it all about the money?
Jonathan Kozol is a curious superstar of the political left on issues of racial inequity and the desolate state of urban schools. As he pointed out in his speech at Central State University Wednesday Kozol is white, Harvard educated, Jewish and was raised in a wealthy Boston family.
(For more on the Central State U. conference go here. To read about NEA President Reg Weaver’s comments go here and here.)
But Kozol, a one-time Boston public school teacher, has made a name as the chronicler of urban school blight, especially in his books Savage Inequalities and The Shame of a Nation.
He observed Wednesday that despite being Jewish he gets frequent invitations to preach as Christian churches in diverse settings that range from inner-city black churches to white suburban cathedrals. He’s even spoken at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., a protestant church that many of the nation’s top government officials frequent.
“As a Jew, it’s my special privilege to preach the words of Jesus to delinquent Christians,” he quipped.
Kozol certainly comes from a partisan point of view. He called No Child Left Behind a “miserable, anti-human” policy and took plenty of shots at President Bush and the political right.
“I’m not paranoid,” he said, “but I suspect there is a little room of sadists and sociopaths in Washington hiding in the basement of some building, like the Heritage Foundation — unhappy people whose sole mission in life is to ensure the children of the poor are no happier than they are.”
Kozol covered a lot of ground in his 90 minute speech, but I think the most interesting arguments he made were about money. Urban schools, he said, need a lot more of it. Like truckloads.
Rich people love to invite Kozol over for dinner, he said. The love to listen to him talk about the tragic decay of urban schools. These are mostly smart, well-educated, sensitive, caring folks, he said.
But frequently, these conversations lead to a question like this:
“Yes, Jonathan, but what can you do? Just throwing money at the problem won’t work.”
Kozol’s reply? Of course you can solve problems by throwing money at them. That’s how the government solves most of its problems. He pointed to the Iraq War.
Problem: We view Iraq as a threat that needs to be neutralized.
Solution: At a cost of at least $85 billion for the first three years, we depose its leader and take over the country
By comparison (I pulled all these figures. He talked more generally), the annual federal education budget is just $71 billion. The annual budget for the Pentagon is $558 billion (not counting the Iraq War money).
I don’t think Kozol was suggesting we swap the Pentagon and education budgets. His point was that when we as a nation really make up our mind to do something about an important problem, one of the first things we do is throw money at the problem.
Education’s $71 billion is, in the scope of things, pretty small money when the government can approve more than that at the drop of a hat for something it is really fired up about.
Take Hurricane Katrina. Congress approved $70 billion almost immediately to help with hurricane relief. Kozol wonders why we don’t treat urban school blight as the equivalent of a natural disaster and as dangerous a threat to national security as a surly foreign power.
And he won’t buy the argument that we can’t give this kind of money to broken systems like urban school districts. Do you know who is handling all the Katrina money? FEMA.
But back to the dining tables of the wealthy, Kozol argues that rich people are living examples of how throwing money at the problem can solve personal education quandaries.
He writes often about schools in the South Bronx, where Kozol said the New York City school district spends about $11,000 per student. But, he said, in a typical New York suburb, they spend $14,000 per kid. And in Bronxville, a wealthy suburb just 10 minutes from the South Bronx, they spend $19,000 per kid. In even more exclusive suburbs, they spend $22,000 per kid — double what they are spending in the South Bronx.
But that’s not even the end of it. Those are the costs for “free” public schools. The really rich people who invite Kozol to dinner start when their kids are 2 1/2 years old by paying $22,000 a year to send them to exclusive “baby ivy” pre-schools in New York City. Then they’ll ship them off to New England prep schools that cost $45,000 a year.
Now THAT is throwing money at an education problem, Kozol said.
“I know people with two kids in those prep schools at once who are spending $90,000 a year,” he said. “And they have the nerve to look me in the eye and ask me if you can really buy your way to better education for poor people.”
Could Kozol be right? Could treating urban schools as a natural disaster and earmarking billions of extra federal dollars over several years really start to make the kind of real change everyone says they want?
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