48 pages • 1 hour read
Jonathan KozolSavage Inequalities
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: "Other People's Children: North Lawndale and the South Side of Chicago"
The next chapter directly illustrates the inequality in education, comparing an affluent neighborhood and an impoverished one. The affluent neighborhood is Winnetka, north of Chicago; the impoverished neighborhood is North Lawndale, west on the Eisenhower Expressway. North Lawndale is an impoverished community, whose economic isolation has been worsening steadily in recent decades. Once the headquarters of Sears Roebuck, crime has been steadily on the rise. The narrative centers on Mary McLeod Bethune School in North Lawndale. Kozol writes that 12 years from now, 14 of the 23 children will drop out of school, and only one will go to college. Many of the students, all of them Black, are classified as "learning disabled." The teacher of this classroom describes the system as a game, in which the students pass from one grade to the next without any real advancement. The problem, he says, is the system of school selection known as "magnet schools."
Magnet schools, Kozol writes, are a system by which parents may opt to send their children to higher-performing schools. This however, drains resources from already-distressed schools, further damaging their prospects. Kozol argues that this system of school choice creates a situation that compounds the economic isolation these schools already face. This problem of inequality and isolation, Kozol writes, originates with the way public schools are financed in the United States: property tax. For more affluent communities, there is more money available per child. In addition to this, wealthier homeowners receive a greater subsidy back than poorer communities receive in education grants. Finally, districts in poorer schools must spend a greater portion of their already-limited budgets on other crises, such as crime, public health, and infrastructure. The magnet system plays off these problems by diverting crucial resources and intensifying the isolation that these communities face. For Black and Latino communities, Kozol writes, the inequality brought by this isolation creates a sense of enduring hopelessness.
Toward the end of the chapter, Kozol describes the attitudes that perpetuate this thinking, in terms of recent education policy. He argues that the push in education policy to create specialized curricula for urban versus suburban students, under the concept of "job skills," is but an attempt to sanction these inequalities. Kozol argues that these proposals—while positive at first glance—are based on the idea that predominantly minority children of impoverished communities and distressed schools are intrinsically less capable, and therefore less deserving of funds. In Kozol's view, such programs seek to enforce class on implicitly racial grounds. This implicit enforcement of class, Kozol goes on to say, is illustrated by the resistance to early-educational programs and overall increased funding, and the reliance upon the private sector, which he believes is responsible for many of the patterns that create and perpetuate economic isolation and inequality.
Chapter 2 Analysis
In Chapter 2, Kozol continues the argument made in the previous section, but centers the comparison between the affluent neighborhood of Winnetka, and the impoverished neighborhood of North Lawndale—neighborhoods both in the Chicago area. The title of this chapter, "Other People's Children," emphasizes what is for Kozol an important psychological point: Much of the inequality in education stems from indifference and antipathy toward the fate of other people's children, versus one's own. In reference to these impoverished children, Kozol asks rhetorically, if others’ children are not Americans, too: Do they not have the right to a quality education, or to even be worthy of our concern at all?
The claim made here, and developed through this chapter, is that the laws and policies governing education are not made with a sense of community, or that of shared outcomes; instead, the system is structured to benefit the children of more affluent parents, while leaving poorer children to fend for themselves. This is compounded, in Kozol's view, by rhetoric of "competition" and "choice," which he believes serves to justify the further isolation and abandonment of these communities. Education policy then, Kozol argues, appears as an extension of the United States' own implicit class warfare, presented in the rhetoric of "competition."
In making this argument, Kozol identifies property taxation, magnet schools, and gifted programs as three methods that serve not only to deprive needy students of a quality education but to justify and further a damaging, unjust system. Kozol advances the idea that while these terms seem neutral, they but actually punish students from poorer families and communities, simply for being poor. Underlying these policies, Kozol argues, is the belief that poorer children have intrinsically less potential, and less to offer society than the children of wealthy families. Spending an equal amount of resources, in this view, would be a waste of time and better spent for "job resources"—mostly for lower-paying jobs. Students in Winnetka, Kozol notes, are not prompted to work toward similar programs; more is expected of them, and they receive more in resources accordingly. The rhetoric of "competition," which the proponents of these programs employ is knowingly deceptive: The real competition is unfair, and ultimately destructive for these already-vulnerable communities.
The structure of this chapter creates a special significance for Kozol's argument. Continuing from the previous discussion of economic isolation in the context of East St. Louis, Chapter 2's discussion of the Winnetka/North Lawndale divide first presents the bleak realities and diminished fortunes of these students, before proceeding to their causes. In doing so, Kozol remarks upon the heavily racial correlation of these problems: The students in the worst-performing schools, with the most diminished opportunities, are overwhelmingly Black. Next, Kozol describes the educational policies he believes to be responsible, with specific attention to their manifest "color-blindness." He does this to illustrate one of the more peculiar and difficult realities of this crisis: One of the qualities that permits these discriminatory, segregating policies is their apparent colorblindness. The implication is subtle, and troubling: A policy which enacts segregation, but does not call for it outright, is more likely to remain on the books; a policy which harms "other people's children" may be simply ignored.
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