Savage Inequalities

So school has been kicking my butt lately, but for one of my education classes we had to read a book called Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol.

This book made me so mad that I felt the need to come and share with you the horrible things that are going on in the field of education right here in the United States.  Now I will say that this book was written in 1990 so the actual information in the book is almost 20 years old, but he has a new book out called Shame of the Nation that focuses on the same topic and shows that the situations that he wrote about are still true in today's society.

Basically Kozol went around to different urban areas in the U.S. and studied the differences between school districts in the city and school districts in the suburban and surrounding areas.  The differences were sickening!  I studied the City of Chicago school district for my class which Kozol talks about in his book and the graduation rate for 2008 was 50%.  There are currently over 300,000 students in the Chicago school district.  This means that over 150,000 of these current students will not graduate from high school.

Now that statistic alone made me sick, but then Kozol digs even deeper to try and figure out why this number is so low.  The buildings that these students are going to school in are horrendous.  Most of the schools do not have heat and air conditioning.  The facilities are unsafe and honestly the students probably should not even be attending the schools.  This next part is what gets me so frustrated though since I am getting my Masters in Education so that I can teach one day.  The school districts that Kozol studies are so poorly run that there are never enough teachers to teach all of the students.  There will be a classroom of over 40 students that will have at least 10 different teachers in one year because none of the teachers care enough to stick around and help these students.

They even quoted one teacher as saying that she was not going to try and help the students learn to read and write at the grade level that they should be reading and writing at because we will always need people to work at McDonald's and Burger King!  Seriously?!  Is that the dream that she has for these children is to work at a fast food joint?

Some of the other school districts that Kozol researches are the South Bronx, East St. Louis, San Antonio, and Southeast DC.  I live about 20 minutes from Southeast DC and so I have decided that I am going to do a fundraiser along with Borders to help raise money for the DC public school system.  These urban school districts need so much help and every little bit helps.  One of the things that schools need the most are books.  Some schools are still using books from the 1980s because they can't afford to buy new ones.

If you are ever looking for a good read (but one that will really make you think and even get you a little mad) then pick up Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities or his new book Shame of the Nation.  I haven't read the second one, but I will probably be purchasing it within the next few days.