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Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > January > 19 > Entry
Is it all about the money?
Jonathan Kozol is a curious superstar of the political left on issues of racial inequity and the desolate state of urban schools. As he pointed out in his speech at Central State University Wednesday Kozol is white, Harvard educated, Jewish and was raised in a wealthy Boston family.
(For more on the Central State U. conference go here. To read about NEA President Reg Weaver’s comments go here and here.)
But Kozol, a one-time Boston public school teacher, has made a name as the chronicler of urban school blight, especially in his books Savage Inequalities and The Shame of a Nation.
He observed Wednesday that despite being Jewish he gets frequent invitations to preach as Christian churches in diverse settings that range from inner-city black churches to white suburban cathedrals. He’s even spoken at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., a protestant church that many of the nation’s top government officials frequent.
“As a Jew, it’s my special privilege to preach the words of Jesus to delinquent Christians,” he quipped.
Kozol certainly comes from a partisan point of view. He called No Child Left Behind a “miserable, anti-human” policy and took plenty of shots at President Bush and the political right.
“I’m not paranoid,” he said, “but I suspect there is a little room of sadists and sociopaths in Washington hiding in the basement of some building, like the Heritage Foundation — unhappy people whose sole mission in life is to ensure the children of the poor are no happier than they are.”
Kozol covered a lot of ground in his 90 minute speech, but I think the most interesting arguments he made were about money. Urban schools, he said, need a lot more of it. Like truckloads.
Rich people love to invite Kozol over for dinner, he said. The love to listen to him talk about the tragic decay of urban schools. These are mostly smart, well-educated, sensitive, caring folks, he said.
But frequently, these conversations lead to a question like this:
“Yes, Jonathan, but what can you do? Just throwing money at the problem won’t work.”
Kozol’s reply? Of course you can solve problems by throwing money at them. That’s how the government solves most of its problems. He pointed to the Iraq War.
Problem: We view Iraq as a threat that needs to be neutralized.
Solution: At a cost of at least $85 billion for the first three years, we depose its leader and take over the country
By comparison (I pulled all these figures. He talked more generally), the annual federal education budget is just $71 billion. The annual budget for the Pentagon is $558 billion (not counting the Iraq War money).
I don’t think Kozol was suggesting we swap the Pentagon and education budgets. His point was that when we as a nation really make up our mind to do something about an important problem, one of the first things we do is throw money at the problem.
Education’s $71 billion is, in the scope of things, pretty small money when the government can approve more than that at the drop of a hat for something it is really fired up about.
Take Hurricane Katrina. Congress approved $70 billion almost immediately to help with hurricane relief. Kozol wonders why we don’t treat urban school blight as the equivalent of a natural disaster and as dangerous a threat to national security as a surly foreign power.
And he won’t buy the argument that we can’t give this kind of money to broken systems like urban school districts. Do you know who is handling all the Katrina money? FEMA.
But back to the dining tables of the wealthy, Kozol argues that rich people are living examples of how throwing money at the problem can solve personal education quandaries.
He writes often about schools in the South Bronx, where Kozol said the New York City school district spends about $11,000 per student. But, he said, in a typical New York suburb, they spend $14,000 per kid. And in Bronxville, a wealthy suburb just 10 minutes from the South Bronx, they spend $19,000 per kid. In even more exclusive suburbs, they spend $22,000 per kid — double what they are spending in the South Bronx.
But that’s not even the end of it. Those are the costs for “free” public schools. The really rich people who invite Kozol to dinner start when their kids are 2 1/2 years old by paying $22,000 a year to send them to exclusive “baby ivy” pre-schools in New York City. Then they’ll ship them off to New England prep schools that cost $45,000 a year.
Now THAT is throwing money at an education problem, Kozol said.
“I know people with two kids in those prep schools at once who are spending $90,000 a year,” he said. “And they have the nerve to look me in the eye and ask me if you can really buy your way to better education for poor people.”
Could Kozol be right? Could treating urban schools as a natural disaster and earmarking billions of extra federal dollars over several years really start to make the kind of real change everyone says they want?
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Urban School Issues
Comments
By jfccrunner
March 28, 2006 5:05 PM | Link to this
Scott, I am a preservice teacher who also recently had the privledge of hearing Kozol speak. While I agreed that all the the problems he identified, are indeed, problems, I disagreed with some of the ways he presented the information. I know for a fact that none of the kids in my area went to a preschool that taught more than maybe the colors. I also know that my school system only spends $4,650 per student. Even with cost of living differences, that’s not very much. I also know that a majority of the students that went to school with me will be very sucessful. I think, in addition to the reforms Kozol has suggested, he should call parents to action. Children are the direct responsibilty of these parents and parents can make a HUGE impact on their children’s education. It shouldn’t be teachers and our nation as a whole’s responsibility to completely take care of a problem that parents should be trying to fix. Do you think this is a point Kozol has forgotten to consider, or am I just naive here? If you’re interested in reading my blog about Kozol’s lecture, you can view it at http://jfccrunner.blogspot.com/. Thanks!By Matthew Brown
January 29, 2006 9:04 AM | Link to this
Okay, if the problem isn’t in the urban schools, if the reasons for poor academic performance in America’s cities is found in the home, then spend the money on poverty programs, drug rehab, job training and the host of other problems that kids face in urban settings, all of which are a blight on their ability to succeed in school. Whatever the particulars of your problem with Kozol’s argument, there’s no question that the essential problem of poverty lies in its definition: Poverty is not having enough money. The Pentagon does not suffer from poverty; America’s inner cities do.By Henry Cate
January 25, 2006 5:22 PM | Link to this
Our nation spends over a half a billion a year on defense. But when making the comparison you have to add in the spending of all the local and state governments. The last I heard our country spent in total over a trillion dollars on education in 2003.By Malcolm Kirkpatrick
January 22, 2006 8:42 PM | Link to this
The coefficient of correlation ($/student, score), where “$/student” is a State’s per pupil budget and “score” is a State’s mean 8th grade NAEP Math score, is weak. There is a stronger correlation between parent income and score. Beyond some point, taking money from parents and giving it to schools will reduce, not enhance, student performance. Across the US, the coefficient of correlation ($/pupil, enrollment) is positive in all but three or four States with five or more districts over 15,000 (or 20,000, depending on which year of the _Digest of Education Statistics you use). Bigger districts get —more— money per pupil. The coefficient of correlation ($/pupil, % minority enrollment) is positive in every single State with five or more districs over 15,000 (or 20,000). The myth of the underfunded, inner-city minority school district (Kozol’s thesis) is a lie. Obsolete textbooks and dilapidated buildings are not due to insufficient taxpayer generosity; the bureaucrats steal poor kids’ life chances. Perhaps Kozol does not know this, but District administrators do. Across the US, the top-spending States ($/pupil) are not the top-performing States (as measured by NAEP Reading and Math scores). Internationally, the top-spending countries are not the top-performing countries (as measured by TIMSS). See OECD Education At A Glance and TIMSS Mathematics Achievement in the Middle School Years. As the economist Eric Hanushek observes, beyond a rather low level, resources don’t matter much to school system performance.By superdestroyer
January 21, 2006 11:37 AM | Link to this
You should also point out that Kozol does not have children and that he favors forced busing, social engineering,and racial quotas on all schools (except for those rich NYC residents who send their kids to private schools). His arguements fail in light of the achivements of immigrants in US public schools and his arguments fail in light of the Kansas City school funding failures and in his own NYC suburbs where all that funding produces tests scores on par with Utah.By peter tamas
January 20, 2006 12:01 PM | Link to this
Kozol’s argument seems to be ‘money talks and something or other else walks.’ The numbers tell us that kids who are getting the something or other else are hurting while the kids getting the money are doing just fine. End of argument…or maybe not. The next line of right-wing defense is to point to failing families and say the education is wasted without large scale interventions (justifying marginal increases in funding). The last time a president went here was about 1934. You see that happening today? Didn’t think so. Yes you can do a lot to fix things within a given budget, and yes, throwing money at a bad system will just make it worse, but a system that is stretched to the breaking point is hard pressed to re-allocate those resources to reform at the expense of the middling service they are now able to render. We’re 2 generations late showin some lovin on this one…American style.By Mary
January 19, 2006 6:33 PM | Link to this
As author Joe Williams points out in “Cheating our kids”, “Additional funding may indeed be necessary, but it’s hard to know because most school districts have been unable to solve the larger problem of how to shift the focus away from employee issues toward the needs of students. We honestly don’t know how much it would cost to put children first because we have never tried. Simply adding more cash to the school system without structural reforms that put the focus on student learning first and foremost doesn’t even come close to dealing with the long-term problem.” I wonder if Central State ever invites some conservatives or centrists to give their views on these issues?