Letters to a Young Teacher

The attitudes and priorities of school principals and the administrations behind them dramatically affect the working lives of teachers in both Kozol’s and Francesca’s experiences. A good principal like Francesca’s has similar beliefs regarding pedagogy and encourages a teacher’s efforts to connect with the classroom, while bad principals like Kozol’s Roxbury public school principal downplay shortcomings, lie to parents, and discourage teachers from bringing their creativity and personalities into the classroom. The administrator who chastised Kozol for reading the poetry of a Black American writer to his class by criticizing “literature written in native dialects” (198) is an example of a bad administrator who has no business working in the education field.

Inequality exists at every level of the American education system. Broadly speaking, there are inequalities between private and public schools. Elite private institutions can provide better resources for their students than many public schools, but access to elite education institutions is unequal: Affluent parents with connections can put their kids into the best private schools more reliably than other parents. There is also inequality within the public system: Schools that test well in richer neighborhoods often receive better funding than inner-city public schools. Finally, inequality factors into each child’s ability to learn: Young students without major responsibilities outside of school (like working or helping to take care of family members) have more attention to give to schoolwork and will usually perform better than students with various obligations and stressors.

Racial segregation in American schools was not solved in the 1960s; one of Kozol’s core arguments is that segregation persists in new and insidious ways to this day. Although there is technically no longer any legal protection for racially segregated schools, many public and private education institutions are practically segregated by virtue of the socio-economic status of the neighborhoods that the schools serve. In the Roxbury public school where Kozol taught, no white children had attended for 18 years straight, Roxbury being a predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood. For historical reasons, Black and Hispanic families in America tend to be less wealthy than their white counterparts and are more likely to live in poorer neighborhoods like Roxbury where there are more underfunded public schools.

Kozol decries privatizing tendencies in the American education system and posits improvements to the existing public education system as the best solution. He is especially critical of voucher systems in which “public dollars would not go to schools themselves but would be assigned instead to individuals who would then be free to spend them either at a public school or at a private institution” (132). Parents often believe that redeeming vouchers at a private institution will save their children from a beleaguered public school system, but in reality, vouchers rarely cover the tuition of elite private institutions. Kozol envisions a future dystopia in which societal divisions are enhanced by a multiplicity of private schools that select the kind of students they want to teach by filtering by race or religion. Kozol calls on his colleagues “to think about how much they would like ‘David Duke Academies’” (142).