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Danh ngôn của Jonathan Kozol (Sứ mệnh: 9)

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.
When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.
The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.
No Child Left Behind's fourth-grade gains aren't learning gains, they're testing gains. That's why they don't last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.
By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.
I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It's blasphemy.
In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable.
So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be inevitable.
It's sad that some people who have one exciting moment spend the rest of their lives rehashing it.
Public school was never in business to produce Thoreau. It is in business to produce a man like Richard Nixon and, even more, a population like the one which could elect him.
'Savage Inequalities' was about school finance, and 'Amazing Grace' primarily dealt with medical and social injustices in New York. But with 'Ordinary Resurrections,' I had no predetermined agenda. When I met with the children, I was not in pursuit of any line of thinking. In our conversations, I let them lead me where they wanted to go.