Savage Inequalities Summary

Jonathan Kozol has been very involved in education throughout his lifetime. Kozol had no initial intentions on getting involved in the education of our youth he simply stumbled upon it. He went into a lower income area of his town and asked an African American church member what he could do to help; the man replied with become a teacher (Jonathan Kozol at BOOST Conference). This was the beginning of a long and passionate journey into education.
The “Savage Inequalities” Kozol has written a book titled Savage Inedualities: Children in America’s Schools to help share with the people of America what is truly going on in the schools. Kozol (2011) shared in his speech at the BOOST Conference that one of the biggest inequalities that children face have to do with the schooling in inner city versus suburban schools. Most inner city schools have extremely large class sizes, upper 20’s to 30’s and even getting into the low 40’s, which most teachers see as an excessive amount of students in a small classroom (Jonathan Kozol at BOOST
Conference). Kozol (2011) said that the majority of suburban parents are angered when their child’s class size approaches or goes over 20. It’s safe to assume that the education that students are receiving while in a smaller class setting is more personalized and individualized to meet every student’s needs.
Race, Class and Education Race and class have a lot more play in society than many would like to recognize. Kozol shared in his 2011 BOOST speech that over half a century has passed since Martin Luther King Jr. but segregated and unequal education has returned. Inequalities are huge in many inner city schools in comparison to suburban schools. On average in suburbs around Harvard the school system spends around $24,000 per person on education in comparison to L.A. where public school spending is around $5,000-$6,000 (Jonathan Kozol at BOOST Conference). The amount of money spent per person affects the quality of education greatly. “This means that children from richer families have access to better teachers, are more likely to be taught in smaller class sizes, and have access to more educational technology” (Macionis, 2015, pg. 387). Access to all of these things promotes a quality education that sets the stage for increased interest in the continuation of learning. Kozol said to think of learning as an exciting pilgrimage, which is just what many students enrolled in suburban school systems do (Jonathan Kozol at BOOST Conference). They structure their life based on furthering their education because of the type of encounters they have with their teachers. However, in lower income schools it is much harder to spark the same passion for learning. Kozol (2011) shared a story about one of his first experiences as a teacher. He was a substitute in a class that had already gone through 12 different teachers. Recognizing the challenges he would be facing, he grabbed the class by the horns and decided to change their perspective on education. He saw that many of these individuals had developed trust issues since previous teachers had constantly abandoned them. Through out the year he saw the love of learning slowly develop in all the students but it took a lot of hard work and more importantly time (Jonathan Kozol at BOOST Conference).
Status Quo or Standardization? Part of the challenges with sparking a love for learning has to do with the use of standardized testing. Many schools spend so much time teaching test preparation skills in order to artificially inflate test scores (Jonathan Kozol at BOOST Conference). Kozol (2011) shares that there is a huge intellectual divide between inner city schools and suburban schools and it has been created because of these standardized tests. A lot of inner city schools worry about their students succeeding on the tests so they spend a lot of time teaching students regurgitation. This is when the teacher says what the test makers are looking for and then the student memorizes the easy answer but never learns how to get the answer on their own. In suburban cities the process of regurgitation is not accepted by parents (Jonathan Kozol at BOOST Conference). Kozol (2011) believes that in suburban schools the students are allowed to take time out of lessons to ask sophisticated questions because teachers are not worried about how these students will do on their standardized tests. Standardized testing has become more of a lesson plan for teachers than an assessment of the students taking the exams. Many teachers are afraid to let children interrupt with their own questions and ideas because they are so focused on fitting all the test preparation information into a school day (Jonathan Kozol at BOOST Conference). This greatly reduces the brainpower and individual thinking of students who are restricted by the standardized testing lesson plans. Inner city children begin to believe that they can never go above and beyond regurgitation because of the way their superiors teach them throughout their early years.
Standardization: SAT The SAT, or Scholastic Assessment Test, is one of the most important standardized tests every college bound individual takes.
This test can be used to evaluate schooling in the United States. According to College Board, the average mathematic score in 1967 was a 516 (out of 800) and the average verbal score was a 543 (Macionis, 2015, pg. 386). These scores have decreased over time to an average of 514 in mathematics and 496 in verbal in 2013 (Macionis, 2015, pg. 386). The lowering in scores could relate directly to the fact that more and more individuals in the United States are finding themselves living in poverty. In SAT Scores and Family Income, it becomes clear that increasing family incomes are linked to increasing SAT test scores. In this article, it shows that when moving up from one income group to the next (each income group represents a range of $20,000) there is an increase of over 12 points in each section (Rampell,
2009).

References:
Jonathan Kozol at BOOST Conference [Motion picture]. (2011).
Macionis, J. (2015). Education. In Social Problems (6th ed., census ed., pp. 380-408). Boston: Prentice Hall.
Rampell, C. (2009, August 27). SAT Scores and Family Income. Retrieved October 21, 2015.