We Have a Long Way to Go - Elaina Ramsey

Jonathan Kozol has dedicated his life to working with low-income children in inner cities. As one of the leading advocates for public education reform and the author of three prize-winning books about his time with children in the South Bronx, Kozol is a steadfast champion of children subjected to poverty. Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America serves as his culminating work about his captivating journey, with them, of friendship, triumph, and loss.

Regarding standardized exams, what impact did the testing policies of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have on these children?
The schools they went to began “obsessive testing,” or teaching to the test.  Teachers were forced to make children read out of these abysmally boring phonics readers, reading systems produced by corporations which were allegedly aligned with state exams.  These kids were the first product of what I would call the test-and-terror regimen which has since overtaken our public education system in this country.

The New York Times recently reported that wealthy neighborhoods in Manhattan are raising about $1 million a year through their PTAs to supplement public education funds. How do you feel about this practice?
What we’re ending up with in wealthy neighborhoods are hybrid public/private schools. So long as this goes on, there will never be an honest meritocracy in the United States. What we have right now is what I would call a purchasable hereditary meritocracy. That isn’t the way to educate citizens in a democracy. Charity is a blessed thing; I’d never turn it down. But charity is not, and will never be, a substitute for systematic justice.

What lessons can we learn from the children in your book?
To me, the lesson is that the public school in neighborhoods of poverty ought to have the same terrific resources, well-respected and well-rewarded, emotionally well-protected teachers that can see the magic in the child’s eyes and have the time to educate. A child shouldn’t have to dazzle the world with her amusing personality to get a wonderful education in an alleged democracy.

That’s why I keep on struggling to defend good teachers against the tendency to treat them with abuse and disrespect. This is why I will continue to do everything in my power to get rid of the obsessive testing, this notion that the only things that matter are the things you can measure. And that’s also why I will continue struggling against the invasion of corporate interests into the public sector.

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