Educational advocate and former teacher, Jonathan Kozol spoke Monday evening to a chapel full of students and community members, promoting his new book and advocating an equal education for all students.
Kozol came to Amherst to promote his latest book, "Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America," which discusses "re-segregation" of public schools and the difficulties facing schools with a high minority population.
Kozol asked his audience to imagine being five years old and being denied naptime or recess and instead having to represent your elementary school's performance based on how you do on a standardized exam. Or imagine having the earliest lunch slot at 9:20 in the morning in the school's grungy and smelly basement, or being in a segregated class of forty students. Such, said Kozol, are the conditions that thousands of children in the United States do not have to imagine because it is reality each day they go to school.
In his hour-long speech Kozol highlighted the prevalence of segregation in many low-income, often inner-city, schools.
"You want statistics?" Kozol challenged. "Out of 11,000 elementary and middle school-aged children in the South Bronx, 22 students were white. I'm not too good at math, but that comes out to be 99.8% minority students."
These schools represent the least funded schools with, no surprise, the highest dropout rate and are what Kozol calls a "sociologically and economically enforced apartheid."
Kozol, who was once fired for teaching a Langston Hughes poem, reminded his audience of the value of education, and told them that it is being denied to so many in this land of "equal opportunity." Kozol gave voice, through innocent, childlike intonation, to the many children whom Congress and politicians don't hear when they make decisions that cut schools' funding. Many of these schools, said Kozol, are economically and racially segregated, and impose strict curricula that box out any opportunity for kids and teachers to express creativity and satisfy wonder. Education in these places becomes a political hunt to meet government standards, forcing our most innocent and curious minds to be its prey, according to Kozol.
"We all know what the NCLB is: No Child Left Untested," Kozol said.
He stated that the No Child Left Behind Act isn't really about holding the government accountable for equal education for all children, but rather imposing high anxiety upon the schools themselves to succeed on standardized tests so that their school can continue to receive adequate funding, which it often is not.
Kozol explained the failing of such testing, saying, "You don't fatten your lambs by weighing them. Our lambs are getting thinner yet we're weighing them more often."
Kozol also stated that testing doesn't foster a child's growth, but may imbue him with terror early on, and it doesn't put more teachers in a child's overcrowded classroom, but it may cause her teacher more anxiety and more pressure to abandon creative teaching methods and instead "teach to the test."
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