Batter Down the Walls Transcript (042)

MARTHA GROUP: Hi! This is Martha Group, Superintendent of the Vernon Verona Sherrill Central School District in the heart of Central New York, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. Pete and I are currently working on a project to learn from the students in my district what they really think about their experience in school and how school could be better for them, so I’m pleased to introduce Pete’s conversation with Jonathan Kozol, an author and education advocate who has kept kids’ ideas about school and their ideas about themselves and their lives outside of school at the center of his work for nearly 60 years. Please enjoy the show!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Jonathan Kozol on the value of listening to students ...

JONATHAN KOZOL: I still listen to the children’s words whenever I’m in a classroom. Where did I get that tendency? It just seemed natural to me. Their language seemed so much more interesting than what I call “expert language.”

[VO]: An inter-district integration program with a 57-year record of success that should be a model throughout the U.S.

KOZOL: This is a beautiful example of what America could be. And with adequate national backing, including ample federal funding to incentivize more metro areas to do this, we could strike a mighty blow against apartheid education in America.

[VO]: And some aims of education ... 

KOZOL: I’d always want to talk about making education beautiful as well as useful, that there’s more to life than corporate utility. There’s also elegance and whim and wonderment!

[VO]: Psyched to read Jonathan’s latest book Batter Down the Walls? Well, you can’t—yet. But you can stick around for a sneak preview. Coming right up!

[02:46]

[VO]: A Rhodes Scholar, former fourth grade teacher, and passionate advocate for child-centered learning, Jonathan Kozol is one of the most widely read and highly honored education writers in the nation. His first book, Death at an Early Age, a description of his first year as a teacher, received the National Book Award in 1968. The book that electrified me and many of my peers when I was first considering teaching was Savage Inequalities, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. In his 2005 book The Shame of the Nation, which describes conditions that he found in nearly 60 public schools, Jonathan wrote that inner-city children were more isolated racially than at any time since Brown v. Board of Education. In subsequent books, and in his recent lectures, he describes the sensitive and skillful ways that good, enlightened teachers resist the harsh and punitive mentality that stifles curiosity and substitutes the fear of failure for the joy that ought to be a healthy part of learning. In our conversation on today’s show, Jonathan offers a sneak preview of his latest book, not yet in print, called Batter Down the Walls. In it he makes a compelling argument that children have a right to be protected from the robotic methods of instruction and destructive forms of discipline that have been accepted in all too many schools that serve our poorest kids of color. Jonathan believes we need to reimagine the aims of education as something more than “testable proficiencies.” Indeed it needs to be a cultural awakening that empowers children with critical discernment of an unjust status quo and with the will to batter down the racist walls that make us strangers to each other. I reached Jonathan at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by phone in mid-January.

[04:46]

PETER: We happen to be speaking on Martin Luther King Day. As I think about Dr. King’s legacy in the context of this conversation, two coincidences are top of mind for me. First, I believe Dr. King’s work was a very real influence in your choice to become a teacher, in 1964. You consulted with a Boston-based colleague of Dr. King’s who asked you to consider teaching in Boston’s segregated schools as one way to participate in the civil rights struggle. But I also believe that in recent years, you have visited several schools named for Dr. King. Could I ask you to begin with a description of one of those schools, either in Boston or elsewhere?

JONATHAN: Sure. I might begin by saying I’ve just completed a new book, and the book is called Batter Down the Walls. And in this book, I talk about the intense and increasing racial isolation of Black and Latino children. And in passing, at one point I describe a school in Boston that I visited, which is named for Dr. Martin Luther King. Like so many of these schools that bear his name, there’s a lot of irony involved, because this is a school in the Roxbury-Dorchester area of Boston, which is the heart of the Black community. And the school is almost totally Black and Latino. I think the principal told me she has maybe 12 White children in the school of about 500 kids. And you know, it’s a school that’s been perennially on various state watch lists. And many of these schools are under threat of state takeovers and things like that. The school is very old. Rundown. I remember when it was renamed for Dr. King in 1968 upon his death. He had actually spoken on the front steps of the school around 1964 to a crowd of parents and ministers and other activists who were struggling for an end to the intense segregation of the schools. And when I visited, it was a very tired-looking building. In one class I visited, you could see there was a hole in the ceiling. You know, you could see the pipes with their lining in the hole above my head as I stood there. And in another classroom—it was an old science lab, but most of the lab equipment had been stripped out—and it was a very long, narrow room. I sat in the back row next to a couple of teenage girls, and they could barely hear the teacher because of the way the room was laid out and because lab tables take up so much space. The two girls sitting next to me were fiddling with their cell phone. I don’t blame them because they couldn’t even see what was on the board from that point [in the room]. On the website of the school, it said, The Martin Luther King Jr. K-8 School is something like the fulfillment of the dream. So, you know, that’s what I mean by ironies.

PETER: Wow.

[09:09]

JONATHAN: You know, I’m trying in my new book, which I hope will go to print by the fall, I’m hoping also to sort of open up a separate issue from racial isolation. And that is, in many of segregated schools, it’s not simply a matter of physical isolation of minority children, but there’s also been the evolution of what I call a disparate agenda, a different curriculum, basically a whole different mode of discipline. Highly punitive: silence in the classroom, silence when filing in the hallways, lists of misbehaviors, and lists of penalties for each misbehavior. I mean, even really good teachers who hate all this stuff have no choice about enforcing this. It’s all test-driven. You know, in one of these schools, there was a rule for children—no questions—and curiosity was suppressed, of course, because that might lead the children off track from the lesson that was drilling them for an upcoming exam. It’s like the kids are perceived as if they were a different species of humanity from White middle-class children in America. I contrast this with some really good, integrated public schools in what are called cross-district integration programs, where children from the city, if their parents so wish, are allowed to ride the bus, you know, often just 30 minutes, sometimes it’s a longer ride, in order to go to some of the best and well-funded suburban schools. In many of the older buildings in segregated districts, the physical disrepair is—it’s not merely depressing, as it was at the MLK school. It’s also dangerous: Crumbling lead paint in many of these buildings. Children cannot safely drink the water in thousands of these schools, because of ancient lead and copper piping. Out in these beautiful suburban schools, you know, usually they’re up to date. They may not be brand new buildings, but they’re in good repair. And the atmosphere is cheerful. The inner-city kids are not seen as if they were uniquely different. The words I tend to hear in some of these inner-city schools from principals—well, they probably wouldn’t use the word deficit, but that’s really what it amounts to: they see the children as deficit commodities. I never sensed that out in these good urban- suburban integration programs.

[VO]: Again, this is an exclusive preview of Jonathan Kozol’s next book Batter Down the Walls, hopefully available as soon as Fall 2023. The first half of the book focuses mostly on inner-city schools, but the in the second half of the book Jonathan describes effective inter-district integration programs. Perhaps his favorite is METCO, as in Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, founded by parents and educators in the suburbs of Boston in the mid-‘60s, in collaboration with the NAACP. The Metropolitan Council advocated for a state funding stream for any town wishing to enroll Boston students in that town’s own public schools in order to address racial isolation. In 1966 the first 220 students, ages 5 to 16, were bussed from Boston neighborhoods to schools in Arlington, Braintree, Brookline, Lexington, Lincoln, Newton, and Wellesley. Initial funding came from the United States Department of Education and the Carnegie Corporation. Jonathan himself taught in METCO for two years.

JONATHAN: So ultimately, we opened the program up to approximately 32 suburban districts surrounding Boston. And the program is still going strong today. It involves about 3000 children. I argue in the book that ought to be mightily expanded and ought to be taken as a model for the nation. It’s not without its challenges because, you know, the children are going into a world that’s very different from the one in which they’ve grown up. But they start the program early. I know lots of kids who entered the program when they were in kindergarten or first grade. The children seem to reach across the lines of class and race far more easily than grownups do. They make good friends. And at the same time, in the best of these schools—the ones that are most sensitive—a lot of effort has been made to make certain that the curriculum and the books that are used and the atmosphere in general are respectful of the cultural values that these children bring with them. They don’t see them as deficit children. They see them as children who have gifts to bring. The Black children in the program have been academically successful in ways that one almost never sees in the inner cities. I think the latest statistic I saw was that 95% of the METCO kids graduate from high school in four years—maybe even slightly more than that. And virtually all of them go on to some form of higher education.

[VO]: Jonathan told the story of a METCO alumnus who returned, after earning a college degree and no small success as a professional blues and jazz musician, to teach in his old school for three years.

JONATHAN: I visited his class, an African American man. He was playing Southern blues to a class of little kids who were sitting around him in a circle: White, Black, Latino, some Asian children. And he was explaining to them how the blues followed the path of Black migration Northwood to Chicago. Just a lovely example of really beautiful multiracial education. You know, not just the ritualistic use of one poem by Langston Hughes! I raise the question of why our national leaders don’t look at a program like this and say, This is a beautiful example of what America could be. And with adequate national backing, including ample federal funding to incentivize more metro areas to do this, we could strike a mighty blow against apartheid education in America.

[18:39]

PETER: As an educator who loves working with kids, what I find most compelling when you write about school is the way that you center the lives and voices of the students. So my first exposure to your ideas was your 1991 bestseller Savage Inequalities, where you lay out explicitly that because you realized that the voices of children were so often missing from the national conversation about education, you made it a point throughout your reporting for that book “to listen very carefully” to students, and wherever possible to “let their voices and their judgments and their longings find a place within this book, and maybe too within the nation’s dialogue about their destinies” [p. 6]. So I wanted to ask, was there an aha moment for you when you realized like, Hey, we are systematically missing the voices of these key stakeholders in our school system?

JONATHAN: Well, I don’t think there was any sudden moment like that. I just, from the beginning, you know, I began, as I said, teaching in that miserable school in Boston that I described in Death at an Early Age. Right from the beginning, I found the voices of the children, even when they described something awful, that it was still invigorating language. You know, it’s vital language.

PETER: So as you know, this is now called student voice. Student voice is the academic term for students’ perceptions, especially about school, in their own words. And I happened to be rereading two weeks ago, what I think is one of the best journal articles on this topic by Alison Cook-Sather at Bryn Mawr. And she credits you and this introduction with igniting the scholarly interest in students’ perceptions of school. It would seem that it had not really occurred to researchers before then, as it still regrettably does not occur to many educators, to ask students directly what they think about school and how it could be better.

JONATHAN: I don’t even like the phrase “student voice” because I mean, with all respect for the author you quoted, who I assume must be wonderful because she quoted me—I’m just joking!— I don’t like the tendency of education experts to what I call reify every idea by coming up with a new trendy phrase for it. So “student voice” I guess is the current word for what I just would call listening to kids and and taking pleasure in their often very funny way of stating things—and sometimes heartbreaking way: I’m thinking of a child in an elementary school in the South Bronx … she wrote me a letter. That’s it, the teacher sent me a bunch of letters from the class, and one of the children, a little girl, was comparing her school to a school that she thought I probably had gone to since I was a White privileged man. And she said, “You have clean things. We do not have”—she didn't finish the second sentence. Just “You have clean things. We do not have”—that, to me, is more powerful than any thousand words from some academic expert on inequality. And I still listen to the children’s words whenever I’m in a classroom. Where did I get that tendency? As I said, it just seemed natural to me. Their language seemed so much more interesting than what I call “expert language.” I just sometimes wish you could plunk some of these kids down in an education graduate program for a moment and just let them ramble on for a few minutes and sort of wake up the experts!

[VO]:  Jonathan cited as someone who taught him a great deal about listening none other than Mister Rogers. Yes, that Mister Rogers, the longtime creator of and advocate for high-quality programming for children. Jonathan writes about their friendship in his forthcoming book, but gives us a little taste here.

JONATHAN: Fred Rogers. Fred became a friend of mine mostly in the last decade of his life. He went with me to go and listen to children in the Bronx. I took him to a school that I’d been writing about, but one where the principal was a little more progressive than others, and where she loved the idea of having Mister Rogers coming and talking to her little kids, and some of the teachers wept! They were so moved to see Fred Rogers squeeze his bottom into those little chairs, you know, and he was very good at not only eliciting children’s questions, but letting them ramble on as as long as they wanted. I miss him terribly.

[25:04]

HEATHER CARSON-WAKE: Hello, this is Heather Carson-Wake, a reading specialist and literacy coach in the Buffalo Public Schools and a proud supporter of the Point of Learning podcast! My grandfather sent me a copy of Savage Inequalities 30 years ago, after he heard Jonathan Kozol on PBS speaking about the sad state of the schools he had visited. My grandfather knew I had just begun my career in teaching, and his gift of Kozol’s book led to many enlightening conversations between us that I will always cherish. Speaking of conversations, conversations like the one I’m interrupting right now—just for a second, I promise—are why I support this show all about what and how and why we learn. Yes, I’m a teacher, but this podcast is for anyone curious about big ideas—like how we make education better for all kiddos—that really matter to everyone. If you’re able to kick in a few dollars a month or a one-time contribution of any amount, click the link in the show’s notes. Thank you, and back to Pete’s conversation with Jonathan Kozol!  

PETER: Probably the savage inequality that maybe is at the center of that book is this disparity of funding between wealthy communities and poor communities based on property taxes. You know, that’s the way that that works. If you could wave a wand and change one thing about U.S. education, would it be the way that schools are funded? I heard you when you were talking about METCO, for example, infusing it with a lot more federal dollars.

JONATHAN: If I had a magic wand, I think I would start with what I call the elephant in the middle of the room, which is apartheid education. And I would do anything I could to encourage school districts to open up the gates. I think White kids benefit every bit as much as the poorest Black and Latino kids do when they can learn together. And I deeply regret that President Biden, for whom I naturally voted—that he’s always turned his back on school integration. And he tries to thread the needle by saying—he used to say he was in favor of integration, but he was opposed to bussing. So I thought, Well, that’s intellectually quite fascinating: to be in favor of integration, but opposed to the one and only way by which to make it possible! I still regret that he’s never repented of the years and years in which he added a stigma to the word bussing. And he was very good at doing that because when, when the Southern racists—the Southern senators with whom he allied himself—when they, when they condemned bussing, you know, it had the taint of Southern racism. But when Biden did it in his more civilized style, it had a lasting impact.

[VO]: I hope you’ll indulge me this bit of historical recording, because I’ve been very attuned to Jonathan’s published writing and public appearances over the last several years, hoping at some point he’d be a guest on the show. On June 6th, 2019 The Nation magazine published an op-ed by Kozol lambasting then-Candidate Biden for collaborating with segregationists as a staunch opponent to bussing kids from Black and brown neighborhoods to wealthier White schools. Exactly three weeks later, this infamous moment occurred during a Democratic presidential debate. The speaker, then the junior senator from California, is now Vice President Kamala Harris:

KAMALA HARRIS: And I’m gonna now direct this at Vice President Biden. I do not believe you are a racist, and I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground. But I also believe—and it is personal, and I was actually very—it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose bussing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day. And that little girl was me.

[VO]: The historical sidebar has concluded. Back to the show!

[29:46]

JONATHAN: If I had two magic wands, the second one would be to alter entirely the way we finance education in America. And in that respect, I haven’t changed in my view since Savage Inequalities. So long as we base the primary source of funding on local wealth, local property, we will never have equal education in America. In my belief, school funding ought to be a national obligation. Money to fund our public schools should come from the real wealth of the nation, which is to say from the federal government. You know, kids don’t go to school and each morning in schools where they still say the pledge, they don’t say a pledge to the State of New Hampshire. They say a pledge to the flag of the United States, one nation, indivisible. And I just cringe when I think of the deception that we’re conveying to children when we ask them to speak those words. If we’re going to say the pledge, I think we need to revise it. I would certainly make it clear that the words of the pledge are aspirational, that they don’t describe the nation in which we live today. But as I say, my book ends on a more hopeful note. I know something that works because I’ve seen it. And I taught in METCO for two years myself, by the way—but I follow it to the present day. I know a little girl right now who’s not only doing wonderfully academically, but her White classmates, some of them from the suburbs come into Roxbury sometimes on weekends and stay for sleepovers. Good God! In this nation, which is torn apart by hatred and fear of each other, this is the kind of model we should treasure. You know, I won’t live to see it—I’m 86 now—but I just hope that there’s a day when we can break down these walls and instead of thinking of this as an exceptional program of inter-district integration, create entire metro area school districts, in which the city district and suburban districts are open to each other. We could also create such marvelous magnet schools within the cities that a lot of the suburban kids will make the ride in reverse. Especially in this area around Boston, you know, with Boston’s incredible research community, bio labs and great and world-famous hospitals. Also, its rich theatrical life and artistic cultural centers, great art museums, including Black history museums, but also, you know, all the treasures of the Renaissance in some of these beautiful museums here. You know, we could create incredible magnet schools affiliated with these institutions, you know, including internships and the famous children’s hospital in Boston. You know, I just think the possibility is there and that’s why end the book on an optimistic note.

[33:44]

JONATHAN: I’ve added an epilogue to my new book, a great long, which is called “A Letter to the Future.” The whole theme of the epilogue is that the humanities are being left out to dry—dry and die!—in all too many schools in the United States because there’s this cult of teaching literacy as a science but divorcing it entirely from literature. I quote a teacher in Virginia who had a wonderful background in literature and wanted to bring in some really good novels to her fifth-grade kids but she wasn’t allowed to do this because the entire curriculum was built upon tiny little snippets of writing that were called “text passages,” which were basically practice tests. And they do this for like six weeks before every exam. So I wrote this epilogue from the heart of somebody who’s been immersed in the humanities my whole life. You know, I majored in literature as an undergrad at Harvard and then briefly at Oxford. And I think that if we simply reduce literacy to a mechanistic skill, we’re falling into a dangerous trap. Yes, of course we need kids to read, we need to teach phonics and all the basic skills of sounding out words and then comprehending them. But I think it’s sort of like cultural starvation if we leave out the richness of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Grouchy Lady Bug and for older kids, A Wrinkle in Time and Number the Stars, and for still older kids, The Bluest Eye, and maybe The Bear of Faulkner. I treasure all that. And I think that whatever the race and cultural background of the child, they’re going to be kind of impoverished if they grow into adulthood without any of this. It’s going to make very narrow citizens, I think. I’d say it’s a kind of brittle literacy, a culturally hungry literacy.

PETER: Right. Well we can point again to the division, you know, where rich kids will be able to think about ideas and poor kids will be able to think about skills. Or text [passages] as you say.

JONATHAN: Yeah, these things are just awful. They’re so boring. When I used to lecture more often—because I don’t travel now; I do lectures by Zoom—when the college would ask me for a title, if I was kind of lazy and wasn’t sure what I was really going to say by the time I got there, I would say I’m going to lecture on joy and justice. And justice had a great deal to do with what amounts to apartheid in our public schools and the pretense of urban school officials that they can achieve perfectible apartheid—high-scoring apartheid. So, you know, that would be the justice part of it. But the joy part of it, I’d always want to talk about making education beautiful as well as useful, that there is more to life than corporate utility. There’s also elegance and whim and wonderment!

[VO]: Amen! That’s it for today’s show. Thanks so much to Jonathan Kozol for joining me. His next book Batter Down the Walls will be available everywhere, hopefully as soon as this fall. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music. Having recently performed throughout Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe and the UK, Shayfer is beginning a U.S. tour as this episode drops, and he just released his new album Shipwreck, which features some string tracks by a fiddler called Peter Horn. Check out shayferjames.com for all the details. Special thanks for music on this episode to pianist Gil Scott Chapman and guitarist Josh Lerner. A former student of mine, Josh is now an educator and academic leader based in Chicago who recalls being addressed by Kozol’s work when he was first studying to be a teacher. Gil was never formally my student, though he remains Exhibit A for why, if at all possible, you should get a baby grand piano donated to your English classroom. Someone nearly as gifted as Gil may wander in one day to ask if they can try it out. Finally, thanks to you for listening, rating, reviewing, and supporting this show however you can. If you can think of just one person who would especially appreciate this episode—maybe a teacher?—please send them a link! It will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered by me here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you in a month or so with a brand new episode featuring Grammy-winning performance artist Rinde Eckert. You’re gonna love it, so see you then!