Quotes by Jonathan Kozol

In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable.

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.

Death at an Early Age was about racial segregation in Boston. Illiterate America was about grownups who cant read. Rachel and Her Children was about people who were homeless in the middle of Manhattan.

Amazing Grace is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. Its a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I dont think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter.

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.

We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals. No, I refuse to pretend the problem is insufficient knowledge. We lack the theological will to do it.

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.

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.

Businessmen are not in business to lose customers, and schools do not exist to free their clients from the agencies of mass persuasion. School and media possess a productive monopoly upon the imagination of a child.

Its sad that some people who have one exciting moment spend the rest of their lives rehashing it.

No matter what happens in a childs home, no matter what other social and economic factors may impede a child, theres no question in my mind that a first-rate school can transform almost everything.