At Public School 261, located in a poor and predominately Hispanic and black neighborhood in the Bronx, overcrowded and underequipped classes are held in a roller rink. A tattered poster in a hallway states, "All children are capable of learning." Yet, a first grade teacher predicts only one-fifth of her students will be at grade level at year's end. At P.S. 24 in the same district, small classes of affluent white and Asian students work busily in airy, well-lit rooms equipped with computers and new encyclopedias. "We know certain things that other kids don't know because we're taught them," explains a confident young student. And that, according to Jonathan Kozol, is the crux of the matter. All children are capable of learning, but many--for the most part, the poor and the non-white--are denied any chance to do so because of the unfair , and ultimately dangerous, way in which America's public schools are funded. Race and money divide students into two separate and unequal camps. Combining carefully researched statistics with first-hand observations--including interviews with teachers, administrators, and students--Savage Inequalities presents a chilling portrait of a system gone awry, and of millions of uneducated American children facing bleak futures. "The school children who speak to Jonathan Kozol . . . know something that President Bush, the self-proclaimed education President, apparently does not know . . . The strongest indictment of the government's insensitivity parsimony in Savage Inequalities is heard in the voices of the children and their teachers."
--The New York Times"He [Kozol] courageously crosses the unwritten line that makes charges of racial discrimination taboo in this day and age . . . a superbly written, thoroughly researched documentary of a world hidden to most."
--Chicago Sun-Times" . . . a haunting reminder of Malcolm X's ever-urgent question, 'If democracy is equality, why don't we have equality?'"
--Mirabella
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Read Mumia Abu-Jamal's article on Savage Inequalities:
"Separate but Unequal . . . Still".