Failing Schools

The class I am in asked us to read Fire in the Ashes  by Jonathan Kozol.

While we were reading, our teacher asked us to think about...1. What is Kozol's view of urban school in the United States?2. Why do segregated and/or poverty-stricken neighborhoods exist in our country? Who's to blame?

Then...We wrote whether we agree or disagree with the claims Kozol makes on the class discussion board.

So I wrote....

According to Kozol, inner city schools, with a few expectations, are “underserved and underfunded” (314). Through Kozol’s writing, research, and time spent with these children and families, you can tell he cares deeply about their livelihood and welfare. Due to circumstances, as Kozol mentions, no matter how hard we [society] hold kids “accountable for their success or failure” (302) we cannot control the outcome of their lives because these children had (nor have) no choice about where they were born, raised, or went to school.

Kozol also unwraps the truths about the schools in the Mott Haven, “the single poorest neighborhood in New York” (15). A mother, Vicky, mentioned that “An A-plus on a book report doesn’t mean a whole lot at this school she [my daughter] goes to.... I don’t think that they can give her what a girl with her potential ought to have.” She goes on to say, “I don’t accept it – yet I do, because I don’t know any choice I have” (21).

Even the headmaster at the boarding school in Massachusetts told Kozol, “The truth is that the school he’s [Jeremy] now attending has not served this young man well. But he saw a spark in him, an appetite for learning” and upon his acceptance into this boarding school, they set a condition, to “repeat a grade because the school believed he would need the continuity of three full academic years to graduate successfully” (225). Kozol uses the parents recognition of failing schools and their kids receiving less than average education as evidence to the history of failing schools in New York, and this nation. He repeatedly brings up occurrences in the lives of these children where education has failed them.

Kozol replays the idea of segregation reappearing to schools and cities. Upon reading Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby and digging into the history of segregation in Kansas City, it is hard not to question whether mandates on federal and state housing are still being used to control where groups of minorities live. Thus controlling the types of schools these children can attend, and the quality of education they receive their, consequently keeping the poverty cycle going. Kozol mentions in his epilogue that charter schools started to form in the Bronx, but they “serve only a small fraction of the student population, and students who do not conform to what the charter schools demand are frequently encouraged to go back into the public schools they came from” (313). I agree with Kozol’s claims and I think they portray a clear picture of the education system as it is today, where the cycle has only continued.