Newsroll: Thursday Education issue

Jonathan Kozol, you're my hero.

I fell for Jonathan Kozol a long time ago, reading Savage Inequalities at the behest of Stuart Palonsky, who was in the fall of 1991 the new director of the Honors College at the University of Missouri.

Kozol came to speak (and read from a book) at the U of Iowa in 1998.

One of my students, a sweet young guy, went to the reading and was so excited to finally understand a song that his favorite band, The Broadways, sang. The song is called "Jonathan Kozol was right," and the student made me a tape of it. The lyrics are here, but let me quote some:

read a book the other day about public schools in our nation
an indictment of our prevailing caste system
it semes so many things i've taken for granted others cant access at all
i ditched computer class while others had no books
i learned to hate my halls, there's holes in walls in schools right in my town

That's about exactly how Savage Inequalities struck me. Not that I ditched computer classes, of course, but the book was a hammer blow. And have things gotten better? No, they've gotten worse. But Kozol keeps going, keeps writing the books, keeps getting to know the teachers and parents and kids and principals and systems, keeps testifying before Congress. He's truly, truly a hero.

So in honor of JK's new book, a short education newsroll:

1. NCLB screws up teachers and students. But Our Hero encourages teachers to use their creativity and keep their individuality anyway.

2. Please can we change this horrific legislation? Are you sensing a theme here? Maybe we can.

3. The dream is dying. Why? Find out from The Civil Rights Project. (You can get the PDF of the report here.)

4. Not that students go to class anyway. Why not? They might not know school is in session.

5. Please, please, PLEASE change this legislation! Even the parents who like their kids' schools know the tests are screwing over their kids' lives and learning.

But things aren't all horrific.

Jonathan Kozol:
I love the unpredictable. I love the whimsical in children. I love it when a child asks me what you might think is a funny question, like, "Do you feel sad because you're old?" Or, "Is it lonesome to write?" It's a wonderful question, don't you think?

I love how he loves children. Me, I love teaching first-year college students, and I also love teaching engaged older college students. But I love that he cares so much about K-12 that he makes me care about it too.