Letters to a Young Teacher. Jonathan Kozol. New York: The Crown Publishing Group, 2007. Pp. 288. $19.95, hardcover. ISBN: 978-0-307-39371-5. TEL: 800-733-3000
This book is made up of a number of letters to Francesca, a pseudonym Kozol uses for a young woman who teaches first grade at an inner-city school in Boston. Their correspondence began when she invited him to visit her classroom. He did, and that led to their epistolary conversation about teaching and education in general. We do not see Francesca’s letters, but we get a sense of them by Kozol’s responses.
In one of the early letters Kozol advises Francesca to take advantage of the experience and examples of some of the experienced teachers in her school. It would be a mistake, he cautions her, to dismiss all of the older teachers as unimaginative and uncaring pedants who are just putting in their time. He then tells her about several experienced teachers who were so helpful to him when he began his own teaching career. Well, Francesca hit the jackpot. Not only does she have some seasoned staff members who are helpful to her in her school, she has Kozol who candidly shares his experiences and observations from forty years of teaching in and visiting America’s classrooms.
Readers familiar with Kozol’s earlier books will find some familiar themes here. Many of the things that have bothered Kozol about America’s schools for decades continue to anger him. One fundamental problem underpins most of the other problems—to use Kozol’s label from an earlier book: Savage Inequalities, and these inequalities occur largely along racial lines.
For starters, many inner-city schools that claim to have “diverse” student populations, actually have segregated populations. As Kozol tells Francesca, “…the school board of a district in New York referred to ‘the diversity’ and ‘rich variations’ in the ‘ethnic backgrounds’ of its student population. But when I looked at the racial numbers that the district had provided to the state, I learned that there were 2,800 black and Hispanic children in the system, one Asian child, and three whites.”
“The percentage of black children who now go to integrated public schools has fallen to its lowest level since the death of Dr. King in 1968. In New York and California, seven out of every eight black students presently attend a segregated school. In your school, as you have pointed out, as in almost every inner-city school I visit, white children make up only one or two percent of the enrollment.”
Finally, he writes that: “The same scenario is seen in schools that serve black and Hispanic neighborhoods even in middle-sized and smaller cities. If I took a photo of the children that I meet in almost any of these schools, it would be indistinguishable from photos taken of the children in the all-black schools in Mississippi back in 1925 or 1930….”
Schools try to placate the students in today’s segregated schools, Kozol says, by teaching them about the heroic strides towards integration and racial equality made during the 1950s and 60s. He tells Francesca about an African-American teacher who said he’d gotten to the point where he couldn’t “stand to hear about the bridge at Selma, Alabama anymore….” “You see,” he said, “to the very poor black children that I teach…, it doesn’t matter much what bridge you might have stood on thirty years ago. They want to know what bridge you stand on now.”
And, it is, of course, these same schools that suffer most acutely from a shortage of supplies and quality teachers. This is the where the achievement gap is greatest.
One of the responses to this adversity, Kozol reports, is bewildering, empty jargon. “This kind of jargon,” he says, “which relies upon the pumping up of any simple notion by tacking on a fancy-sounding prefix or a needless extra syllable, infests the dialogue of public education nowadays like a strange syntactic illness that induces many educators to believe they have to imitate this language if they want to have a place in the discussion.”
“So there is a bandwagon phenomenon,” he says. “Successful principals,” we are advised, “replicate best practices,” “identify objectives,” “initiate collaborative processes,” “articulate clear goals,” and “evaluate results” that “impact student competencies and performance….
He warns that, “Once these words and phrases are disseminated widely, they begin to be employed without much thought by school officials and political appointees who apparently believe the word or phrase itself will lend significance to unexamined utterance. Not ‘big words’ in themselves, but big words that say nothing more than little words could say, sometimes have the added benefit of making a circular statement sound like a real idea.”
Kozol’s harshest criticism is aimed at the high stakes testing that currently has America’s schools in its grip and its unfortunate spawn, scripted teaching programs. Francesca had complained several times to Kozol about the anxiety these tests had created in her school.
He responded by telling her that suburban schools, where students tend to do well on these tests, do not feel the anxiety as acutely as inner-city schools do and, as a result, teachers feel less pressure to distort the curriculum to push up the test scores.
However, he writes, “It’s a different story in too many inner-city schools, especially the ones that have been labeled ‘low-performing’ for historically high rates of failure. If these congenitally underfunded schools don’t post the gains the government demands, they face a series of penalties, including loss of funds, so that the schools with fewest resources will end up with even less. And if their rate of progress isn’t fast enough to satisfy the government, they also have to pay for private test-prep corporations to come into school and drill their students for the next set of exams—more money for testing, less money for instruction.
“In order to avoid these penalties, principals have often been reduced to taking measures which they tell me privately that they abhor. Thousands of inner-city elementary schools, for instance, have dramatically cut back the time permitted for instruction in the content areas—science, social studies, literature, and the arts (the arts themselves have been abandoned almost totally in many of these schools)—in order to create long periods of time, typically at least a quarter of the year, in which the children can be drilled on strategies to try to boost their scores.”
He tells Francesca about one inner-city elementary school that devoted three hours every day to drills designed to prepare fifth grade students for upcoming standardized tests. He says, “There was no pretense that these drilling sessions held the slightest bit of educative value for the students….If test-drilling were regarded as a valuable portion of instruction, it would have been given to all children in the school throughout the course of the entire year. The reason this was not done was that nobody believed test-drilling was of educative value. Its only function was to skew the scores, defend the school from state or federal punishments, and, as many of the teachers at the school believed, enhance the reputation of the principal.”
But, Kozol writes, he would not be opposed to the tests if they actually worked. “The trouble is,” he says, “they do not work except for the lowest-scoring children in a class, and, even then, the gains that they achieve sustain themselves for only a brief period of time. These are testing gains, not learning gains. If they were learning gains, they would persist into the secondary grades; but I have followed many of these children into middle school, and then into their high school years, and seen how rapidly these artificial gains evaporate.”
Kozol believes teachers have a moral responsibility to resist this practice. He says, “Teachers have to find the will to counteract this madness. At very least, they ought to make it clear to every child in their room that high-stakes testing is, at best, a miserable game we’re forced to play but that our judgment of our students’ intellect and character and ultimate potential will have no connection with the numbers tabulated by a person who is not an educator, and has never met them, working in a test-score factory 1,000 or 3,000 miles away.
“I don’t like to say something so harsh, but if teachers cannot figure a way to do this, it is possible that they should not remain within the classroom. Abject capitulation to unconscionable dictates from incompetent or insecure superiors can be contagious. We should not permit this habit to be passed on to our children.”
So, is there any good news about the schools? Does Kozol see any reason for optimism? Absolutely. He has faith in good teachers. In his first letter to Francesca he writes: “‘Start out tough and stick to the prescribed curriculum,’ new teachers are too frequently advised. This, in my belief, is the worst possible advice. Establishing a chemistry of trust between children and ourselves is a great deal more important than to charge into the next three chapters of the social studies text or packaged reading system we have been provided: the same one that was used without success by previous instructors and to which the children are anesthetized by now. Entrap them first in fascination. Entrap them in a sense of merriment and hopeful expectations….”
He tells Francesca what he looks for when recruiting college students to teach. “…if they’re dynamic and engaging individuals, if they’re in love with children and in love with language and like to read good books and poetry and talk about them with excitement, and if their heads seem thoroughly screwed on,…if they’re the kind of person you’d be eager to have as an intern in your class—I always say, ’Come on! Wrap up the courses that you need in order to be certified. Then bring your interesting personality, your energy, your love of beauty, and the academic benefits of your good education into the schools where people with your gifts are needed most.’”
At the end of the book Kozol tells readers how to join him on the ramparts in the battle against “high-stakes exams, scripted instructional materials, and other aspects of the new accountability regimes imposed on teachers by the federal government and by local boards of education.” Jonathan Kozol’s is an important voice in the argument that what is best in our schools resides not in their test scores but in their shared humanity.
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