Playboy Interview: Jonathan Kozol

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of "Plessy vs. Ferguson" that separate but equal accommodations for blacks in railroad cars did not violate the "equal protection" clause of the 14th Amendment and, therefore, were constitutionally valid. While the majority opinion was ponderously written and strained the bounds of reason, the dissenting opinion, authored by Kentucky-born Justice John Marshall Harlan, was an exercise in simple eloquence: "In the eyes of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens . . . the humblest is the peer of the most powerful."

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in "Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka" that segregated schools were unconstitutional. The case was the first challenge to the concept of separate but equal since "Plessy," and the High Court ruled unanimously to reverse the historic 1896 decision.

Now, in 1992, nearly a century after Justice Harlan penned his prophetic dissent and 38 years since those words were transformed into law, segregation is still rampant in American classrooms, according to Jonathan Kozol, 55, teacher, author and self-appointed watchdog of the nation's education system. "What seems unmistakable," writes Kozol in his latest book, "Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools"---an indictment of disparities among our schools--"is that the nation, for all practice and intent, has turned its back upon the moral implications, if not yet the legal ramifications, of the Brown decision. . . . The dual society, at least in public education, seems in general to be unquestioned."

Sounding the alarm about education in America is nothing new to Kozol. He first reported on its inadequacies a quarter century ago in "Death at an Early Age," a controversial exposé about poverty and racism in Boston's public schools. With "Savage Inequalities, " he has sharpened his knife. Noting that many of the country's schools have continued to deteriorate, Kozol ridicules the ineffectual agendas of the past two Administrations' slickly packaged education policies. He relegates President George Bush to the role of, at best, disinterested observer and, at worst, sanctimonious fraud.

While "Savage Inequalities" claimed a place on the best-seller lists almost immediately after it arrived in bookstores, the critical response to it--and the national debate it stirred--has been even more passionate. Publishers Weekly, the authoritative voice of the book industry, was so taken with "Savage Inequalities" that it placed on its cover--usually reserved for advertising--an open letter to the President, demanding that he read the book. Kozol was then invited by a Presidential aide to discuss his views with the Administration. In a manner that betrays his appearance--his looks are bookish, his delivery is scholarly--Kozol continues to make his case in any available forum. He is steadily in demand for morning talk shows and news programs; his memorable run-in with Patrick Buchanan on CNN's "Crossfire" offered one of the few times that the pugnacious talk-show host and would-be President had been stopped in midvitriol by anyone, let alone by a mild-mannered, liberal intellectual like Kozol.

What Kozol has to say about America's failure to educate its children goes beyond media hype or political opportunism. "Savage Inequalities"--a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award--is equal parts painful and poignant, and Kozol has acknowledged that it was unsettling for him to write it. There were times, he says, that "I just had to stop writing and cry when I thought of all those children and their ruined lives."

Kozol, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar, came to his current celebrity quite by chance. Born in 1936 in the well-to-do Boston suburb of Newton, he grew up privileged, attending an elite prep school before moving on to Harvard and Oxford. After college, he began his career as a would-be novelist in Paris during the days of the Beat Generation. Although he found the expatriate life enlightening, Kozol realized that he had no grand adventures to write about and eventually returned home to Boston, intending to study law. One day, he spotted a sign in Harvard Square asking for volunteers to teach in "freedom schools," the spare educational facilities that sprouted up during the civil rights movement of the early Sixties, and soon Kozol was teaching impoverished and illiterate black children in crammed classrooms in Roxbury, one of the poorest sections of Boston.

This firsthand teaching experience led Kozol to write "Death at an Early Age," his scathing assessment of Boston's public schools. Although the book was criticized by experts---specifically for its charges of racism against the white establishment---it went on to win a 1968 National Book Award and, for its author, a place in the media spotlight. Several more recent books include "Illiterate America" (1986), in which Kozol explored how the nation's poor "navigate society" as adults, and "Rachel and Her Children" (1988), a compilation of interviews Kozol conducted with New York's homeless.

While writing "Rachel," Kozol kept hearing horror stories about New York public schools from the children he interviewed. Prompted by these reports, he decided to reexamine the nation's schools; his objective was to compare the diverse education programs and facilities throughout the United States and then write a sequel to "Death at an Early Age." Traveling throughout the nation, Kozol visited both devastated inner-city schools and those in the more affluent suburbs. He discovered two separate education systems---distinctly similar, yet completely unequal. Both were funded by local community revenues and some federal and state aid, but the difference between the two was staggering: from the school in East St. Louis that literally became a cesspool to the carpeted, climate-controlled institution in Great Neck, New York.

Kozol also discovered profound depression among many black and Hispanic students forced to endure prisonlike facilities in the nation's poorer school districts. Because the parents of these students are badly educated and because few vote, Kozol reasons, they cannot make their political will known, thereby locking the children into a desperate state that will only get worse.

Kozol is unrelenting in his denunciation of the Reagan-Bush years. He says that the promises of a better education system made by both Presidents were exaggerated and empty. Their Administrations' policies, he charges, have only widened the gap between classes in this country, exacerbating a trend in which the rich get everything and the poor and middle class get what the rich think they deserve---or are willing to allow. Kozol is trying to provide relief to the victims of this condition. He has used proceeds from his books to establish the Education Action Fund, a nonprofit organization that offers emergency assistance to inner-city children and their families.

To find out more about Kozol and what has gone wrong with our public schools, Playboy sent Contributing Editor Morgan Strong to Kozol's home in Massachusetts. Here is Strong's report:

"Jonathan Kozol lives not far from the site of this country's second Revolutionary War engagement---Concord, Massachusetts---a setting that, in his case, is appropriate: Kozol is fighting for what he believes to be the salvation of a nation founded on the fundamental principles of fairness, justice, equality and a duty to do what is right for all its citizens. He is unmarried and has no children. He lives alone, off the main highway, in a Revolutionary-era house. It's a writer's house, cluttered with books, newspapers, magazines, reference manuals---all in a calculated disorder with which Kozol is obviously comfortable.

"Kozol is not insistent that a listener adopt his viewpoint; neither is he apologetic about his own. His arguments are often subdued and thoughtful, but fueled by the battle he has waged for the better part of his life. Despite the grim evidence in his writing, he is, nevertheless, optimistic. Little can shake his confidence that all will be put right in our public schools---and in the country, for that matter---as long as we appeal to the basic decency of Americans."

[Q] Playboy: Didn't your career as a teacher begin almost by chance?

[A] Kozol: I never intended to become a teacher. I had a privileged upbringing. My father is a neuropsychiatrist, my mother a social worker. I lived in an affluent suburb of Boston---Newton, Massachusetts---and went to an elite prep school. Then I went to Harvard and, after that, to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.

[Q] Playboy: Not the typical path for someone who'd wind up as an elementary schoolteacher in the ghetto.

[A] Kozol: No. I really wanted to be a writer, a novelist. I spent four years in Paris writing an awful lot of fiction---most of which ended up in the Seine. [Laughs]

But it was an exciting time in my life. I felt very lucky just to be there. I lived in a seventh-floor walk-up in a hotel with no name. Later, it became famous as the Beat Hotel. William Burroughs lived on the second floor and Allen Ginsberg on the third. When I moved in, I got [poet] Gregory Corso's room. And I quickly met a number of older writers who encouraged me. James Jones, in particular, was a wonderful friend to me. William Styron and his wife would come over to visit Jones, and I got to meet them. Then there were Henry Miller, Richard Wright and Lawrence Durrell. Just a wonderful experience.

[Q] Playboy: But you didn't stay there.

[A] Kozol: I came back to Boston at the end of 1963. I had learned a great deal about how to write, but I realized I had never experienced anything worth writing about. I suppose I could have written a novel about a creative-writing class.

[Q] Playboy: Did your return to Boston stimulate your interest in education?

[A] Kozol: No. I was ready to go into a conventional career. My father was quite concerned about me; he expected a Rhodes scholar to do very respectable things. I was twenty-six by then and he thought I should be at least the junior Senator from Massachusetts. Instead, I was a struggling writer living in Harvard Square.

[Q] Playboy: Just drifting?

[A] Kozol: I had intended to go back to Harvard Law, get on track and become a member of Congress, go into banking, become a college president---whatever it is that Rhodes scholars do.

[Q] Playboy: But instead?

[A] Kozol: Instead, some important things happened in the spring of 1964. The first was that three young men---freedom workers---disappeared in Mississippi. So I began to think about American politics.

[Q] Playboy: Had you thought a lot about American politics before?

[A] Kozol: I hadn't really thought of myself as American then. You see, the prep school I went to was the kind where all the older people, the teachers, spoke as if they were very bitter. At Harvard, I lived in Eliot House, where virtually everyone was an Anglophile and pretended they were British. Our teachers never paid attention to American literature. We had what I call the Henry James disease: We all looked east to England. And then, of course, there was Oxford, where the people really were English. But then those three men disappeared and were found murdered.

[Q] Playboy: Why did that hit home? What relevance did their deaths have to you?

[A] Kozol: One of them, Michael Schwerner, was much like me. He came from a regular Jewish family in New York. He probably thought it was the decent thing to do to go down to Mississippi and help people register to vote. He probably never dreamed he would give up his life. So there was a sign in Harvard Square asking for volunteers for freedom schools---not down South, but in Roxbury, which is the black section of Boston. Something crystallized in me, I don't know why, and I went there---got on a train to Roxbury and started teaching in a freedom school.

[Q] Playboy: What was that like?

[A] Kozol: There was de facto segregation there. It didn't matter, especially to the kids, whether it was by law or neighborhood. That trip across town was the longest trip I've ever taken. It changed my life. Just a twenty-minute train ride. I've never returned in any real sense.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do there?

[A] Kozol: I taught black fifth graders who had learned nothing in school. They were virtually illiterate. It was extraordinary. I was a sub; Harvard doesn't have teaching-method courses, and I couldn't be certified as a teacher. I was supposed to teach an hour and a half a day, three days a week. But the kids started bringing in their older brothers and sisters, and they asked that I expand the class to all day, five days a week. And I did.

[Q] Playboy: It sounds like you made quite an impression.

[A] Kozol: I taught thirty-five kids. We didn't have a classroom, so we shared an auditorium with a bunch of other classes. My students had had twelve substitute teachers before me. I was their only permanent teacher. Their skills had been completely destroyed by the school system. There were old, unusable texts and no money for supplies. It was just a holding pen.

[Q] Playboy: But you were eventually fired from that job. Why?

[A] Kozol: Because I read the class a poem. Really. At least, that was the reason given: teaching from unauthorized texts. Curriculum deviation. That was how it was reported in The Boston Globe.

[Q] Playboy: What actually happened?

[A] Kozol: I had brought two books into class: a volume of Robert Frost and another by Langston Hughes. I read one poem from each book and, as a consequence, I was fired.

There was a little black girl in the class who never smiled or responded. She just hated me---hated my white skin. And when I read the Langston Hughes poem to the class---"What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?"---she started to cry.

Until that point, the children had given very little to a white man; they were so embittered. There was one tiny boy---eight years old, couldn't read or write, but he could draw very well. The art teacher in the school disliked his work and would rip it up in front of him. Once, the boy stabbed his pencil into the teacher's hand because of that. He's now in prison for twenty years---he murdered a man about five years ago. I'm trying to think of the line by W. H. Auden---something like: "I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return."

[Q] Playboy: Were there other reasons for your dismissal besides the poems?

[A] Kozol: Dr. [Martin Luther] King had come to Boston and I was asked to act as one of his bodyguards. [Laughs] I was just a skinny kid, so they asked me more as a gesture of friendliness. I was flattered, of course. They gave me a little civil rights pin to wear---just an equals sign, white on black, very small.

Well, I wore it to class. I had only one jacket, which I wore every day, and I forgot I still had the pin on it. My principal saw the pin and ordered me to take it off. She said, "It's a nice sentiment, but don't wear it here." We were standing in front of the class and I just couldn't do it. I felt that if I did, the students would never trust me again. So I refused. And remember that little girl, the one who never smiled? She came running up to me after the principal left and kissed me. I've never forgotten that.

[Q] Playboy: So you were out of a job.

[A] Kozol: Yes. But strangely, about ten days later, I was hired by the federal government and helped design the curriculum for Upward Bound [a college-preparatory program]. And soon after that, I was hired to teach in one of the wealthiest suburbs of Boston.

[Q] Playboy: Then came your first book, Death at an Early Age, in which you claimed racism was at the root of the inequities in our country's school system. What was the response to that?

[A] Kozol: It was severely criticized at first. Some of the respected folks at the Harvard School of Education said that I was overstating the racism issue. But to my surprise, the book won a National Book Award six months later. And that changed my life more. From then on, I've been engaged in the political aspects of education.

[Q] Playboy: What was it like teaching in a wealthy suburb?

[A] Kozol: It was my first experience with the dual society. I had twenty students in a beautiful school, with a real classroom of my own and a principal who loved good poetry. The difference between the education of the rich and the poor children was enormous. I taught there for three years and went back to Roxbury. Some of the parents and I formed a new freedom school. A full-time freedom school of our own. A real school.

[Q] Playboy: Is that when you really began to concentrate on the duality of education in America?

[A] Kozol: By the early Seventies, I was writing a much longer book about wealthy children. I was concerned about the degree to which these children are anesthetized to what's going on among poor people. They grow up with a sense of ethical exemption. Even the best of them---who read good books and are worried about injustices, inequality and segregation---are convinced by their education that they are powerless to change it.

By the time the book came out, the nation had swung far to the right, and it was universally damned. It went out of print almost immediately. I consider it by far my best book. It was called The Night Is Dark and I'm Far from Home.

[Q] Playboy: Robert Frost again?

[A] Kozol: Yes. The book was about how decent middle-class kids lose their sense of ethical determination---lose a sense of justice, really---and how public schools anesthetize kids against the dictates of their conscience. I admit that it was written with too much passion; they said the book was too angry. It would have been better if I had been dispassionate. But, to my great pleasure, the book developed a kind of underground following. About ten years later, it was reprinted by a religious publisher. Then it became required reading at a couple dozen colleges. It's now in its fifteenth printing.

[Q] Playboy: Do you continue to teach?

[A] Kozol: No. During the Seventies, I began to grow more interested in the problems of the poor as they grow older. I studied the health, education and adult lives of migrant workers. I worked with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. We went through some rough times in Arizona, where a top education administrator was said to follow the line of the John Birch Society and the state troopers resembled fascists. They were pretty tough bastards.

[Q] Playboy: You met them?

[A] Kozol: Oh, yeah! I thought they were going to kill me one night. They stopped me on a lonely road, four troopers in two cars and a police helicopter. They threw me around and took my address book with all the names and addresses of the nuns and priests I had been working with. But then a reporter from The Arizona Daily Star drove up and she convinced them to leave me alone.

I had a lot of tough experiences like that, and by the mid-Seventies, I was very discouraged. I felt the nation was swinging too far to the right and that the dreams I believed in would never be fulfilled. I was also afraid that my books were going out of print; I didn't think I could make a living as a writer any longer.

[Q] Playboy: But you didn't quit.

[A] Kozol: No, but by 1980, I came close. I was offered a job as a professor of religion at Exeter; I was also offered a professorship at the University of Massachusetts. But I didn't want either.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Kozol: I didn't want to spend the rest of my life telling rich kids about poor kids. Or, like many ex-activists do, spend the rest of my life in tweeds with a pipe, telling tales over sherry of what it was like to have been brave when I was young---playing old, scratchy Pete Seeger records, a few posters on the wall to remember the Sixties.

[Q] Playboy: And your writing?

[A] Kozol: My literary agent discouraged me greatly. He told me he didn't think anyone in America wanted to read a liberal author anymore. I found another agent, a terrific woman who said I could write what I wanted---disregard the advice I'd been given and get on with it.

[Q] Playboy: So what did you do next?

[A] Kozol: I wanted to write a book about what happens to the poor when they leave school. They don't have the skills to navigate society: They can't earn a living or hold a decent job, they can't understand the forms they get---the welfare applications, the tax forms, the mortgage forms---and some of them can't read a telephone directory or a newspaper. It's a terrible existence and a lot of them are driven to crime or prostitution. I spent three years on that book. It was called Illiterate America. To my astonishment, it became a modest best seller in the midst of the Reagan age.

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't that show that the people of this country are concerned with the problem of illiteracy?

[A] Kozol: This country could end illiteracy overnight if it wanted to. We have the means to do it, we just don't do it. We spend more money to keep a military force in Norway than we do on illiteracy.

[Q] Playboy: Throughout all of this, what was going on in your personal life?

[A] Kozol: I was going to be married; I had been living with a woman for about five years. I came back from my lectures on Illiterate America and hoped to have a normal Christmas. But then I picked up The New York Times and read a story about a little boy, an infant, who had died while he was homeless. I got into my car, drove to Logan Airport and flew to New York. I found the mother of that little boy, then found the shelter where she had lived during her pregnancy: the Martinique Hotel. I spent a year visiting her every day.

[Q] Playboy: What about your girlfriend?

[A] Kozol: I was seldom home. By the time I had finished the book and come home, she had given up and moved away.

[Q] Playboy: And the book?

[A] Kozol: The book was called Rachel and Her Children, published in 1988. I'd met several homeless families who opened up to me---not during the day, because that's when they have the toughest time surviving in that atmosphere, but late at night. They would come to me after midnight and tell me their stories. They told me about their hopes and dreams for their children and about all the things they had longed to do when they were children. That's when they would begin to cry.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't this book also cause some controversy?

[A] Kozol: A few months after it was published, Mayor Koch shut down the Martinique. I'm not sure it was simply because of the book, but simultaneous coverage of the hotel in The New Yorker probably placed considerable pressure on the city of New York. The larger families who had lived there were given housing in the Bronx. Now the press never talks about the homeless anymore except for four weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It makes us feel pretty pious when we go to pray.

[Q] Playboy: This experience led to your 1991 book, Savage Inequalities.

[A] Kozol: Some of the kids I met at the Martinique would call me from their new homes and tell me about what was going on in their schools. Just one horror story after another. And I decided that it was time to take another look at the public schools. I had wanted to do a sequel to Death at an Early Age and that's what this new book is.

[Q] Playboy: You took another look at the system?

[A] Kozol: Yes. I started to visit schools in the Bronx and became so angry when I saw the things the kids were going through. Then I visited schools in Chicago, East St. Louis, San Antonio, Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., Paterson and Camden, New Jersey, Lawrence, Massachusetts, and some schools around Boston. In all these schools, there are mostly minority children.

[Q] Playboy:Savage Inequalities, which made the best-seller lists, has debunked a few myths and presumably upset the "education President." Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine, devoted its cover to an open letter to President Bush imploring him to read your book. It seems you have opened a wound.

[A] Kozol: I'm astonished that this book has reached such a large audience. It's going to sell more copies than anything I've ever written---even more than Death at an Early Age. Many readers of the book might have been happier if I'd just said that the situation was sad. They could have read it and said, "Well, I wept when I read Jonathan's book, so I guess I'm a good guy because I have compassion." But this book doesn't ask for compassion. It asks for anger and action. And that intimidates people. Most people tell me that after they've read the first chapter on East St. Louis, they take a walk and forget about it for a while. But I wanted to write a book that will keep rich people from sleeping easily until they act upon what I've written.

[Q] Playboy: What in the public school system so enraged you?

[A] Kozol: I was stunned by the incredible discrepancies between the urban and suburban schools---just astonished. I knew that there were some inequalities in America and probably still some degree of segregation, but I had no idea how much these things had intensified.

[Q] Playboy: You mean, decades after busing---and having spent millions of dollars to improve the system---it's worse?

[A] Kozol: By and large, the schools are probably more separate and less equal than they were when I began teaching twenty-five years ago. It's sad to see all that work done for nothing, to see so little change after all these years.

[Q] Playboy: Why does that surprise you?

[A] Kozol: I didn't think it would be this bad. Like most Americans, I believed in the myth of progress: If you don't hear anything about it for ten years, it must have gotten better. But the schools are more crowded, the black children are more segregated, their health is worse, their nutrition is worse, their teachers' pay is comparatively worse. The schools are more like garrisons or outposts or prisons than places of education.

[Q] Playboy: How can you explain this?

[A] Kozol: Schools are funded by a property tax in the United States, a local property tax, and the inner-city schools and poor districts simply don't have money. The federal government used to contribute ten percent to local school expenses but, under President Reagan, that was cut nearly in half. Now it's six percent. States contribute something, and in some states, it's up to fifty percent. The intention of state aid is to equalize school funding between rich and poor districts to make up the disparities in local school wealth. In most cases, though, the aid is insufficient to create any kind of real equality. And in some states, the assistance---for no understandable reason---goes in greater abundance to the rich districts than to the poor. It simply widens the gulf.

[Q] Playboy: Can you give an example?

[A] Kozol: New York City spends just over seven thousand dollars per pupil. Great Neck, on Long Island, spends more than fifteen thousand dollars. In a just society, these numbers would be reversed. The needs are infinitely greater in the Bronx than in Great Neck. Kids in Great Neck already have computers at home.

[Q] Playboy: There are charges that the national public school system is corrupt and mismanaged. Is the money actually spent on educating students less than what could be realized?

[A] Kozol: It's always easier to blame the victim than to blame ourselves. I mean, people tell me nowadays that New York City schools are wasteful, bureaucratic and corrupt. The fact is, even if New York City had the most efficient, honest administration in the world, it would still be, at best, a tenth-rate system---just more efficient.

But ethics, not appearance, is the issue. The children are indoctrinated to believe that they live in a truly just society. They believe there is equal opportunity, that the best really can prevail. But every so often, they notice contradictions. They notice that many members of the Senate are millionaires. That gives them pause. They reflect, perhaps, that Dan Quayle did not become a Senator or Vice President exclusively on merit.

[Q] Playboy: But aren't success and financial reward implicit in our society?

[A] Kozol: Yes, but the deck is stacked against almost all children in America who are not privileged. How about that amazing coincidence that two generations of George Bush's family were admitted to Phillips Academy and three generations went to Yale? Somehow, they don't identify with the poorest children, the blacks and Hispanics, because they don't see them. They never know them. They live in a separate universe.

[Q] Playboy: So there is some distant awareness but no real concern.

[A] Kozol: Right. There are some wonderful teachers in high schools who assign students books on these issues. But what's interesting is that, while the students develop some cognitive knowledge of these things, it doesn't touch their hearts. It doesn't touch their sense of entitlement to a privileged existence. They seem reluctant to believe that what they get is gotten at the cost of someone else. They want to believe they are winners in a fair game. They don't want to believe the game is rigged.

Sometimes students will say to me, "Obviously it's not fair. If I lived in the Bronx, I wouldn't be going to Amherst. I don't study very hard and I'm still going to Amherst. How could that be?" But it's only the rare suburban student who stays up nights worrying about this.

I was in a high school in Rye, New York, and we were discussing whether or not it would be fair for the parents of those students to pay higher taxes for the benefit of inner-city students. And one young woman said, "I don't see why we should do that. How would that benefit us?" Another student once told me this situation troubles him, but added, "It's easy for me to be liberal now because I don't have to pay the mortgage." There is a sense of fatalism there---to go the way of his parents once he's a little older by shelving his ethics for a more pragmatic view.

[Q] Playboy: Is this an inevitable situation?

[A] Kozol: No, I don't think so. There have been times in American history when privileged children were profoundly subject to pangs of conscience and willing to take action. After all, many decent Americans---some of them children of the richest people in our country---went to the South to change the laws of the land in the early Sixties. And thousands of decent kids took a role in changing history. But nowadays they are anesthetized. They are either unwilling to take any action or they're persuaded that it won't make any difference.

[Q] Playboy: Are we talking about the Me Generation?

[A] Kozol: In this sense, they are the true children of the Reagan era. That young woman who asked why her parents should be taxed to pay for poor kids----how it would benefit her---is the perfect product of the Reagan-Bush years. When I hear her voice, I say to myself, President Reagan was triumphant beyond his greatest dreams. He has surgically removed the soul of conscience out of our children and replaced it with the most crass and unhesitating self-interest. Ronald Reagan was a genius. He has made millions of Americans as selfish as he and his wife.

[Q] Playboy: President Bush has frequently implied that the inefficiency of the system is the primary cause of our problems. Can't that be true?

[A] Kozol: Even if the school systems were administered by one of the C.E.O.s that George Bush admires, they would still be separate and unequal school systems. There is also corruption and mismanagement in the suburban school systems. That doesn't come to our attention because they have so much more money to start with. We never focus on the inefficiency of the rich districts, only on the school districts that have blacks and Hispanics as dependents.

[Q] Playboy: Much attention has been paid to discipline as a possible remedy for this problem. Joe Clark, the black Paterson, New Jersey, principal on whom the film Lean On Me was based, is an example.

[A] Kozol: A dreadful educator. Black parents in Paterson have said to me flatly that [former Secretary of Education and drug czar] William Bennett anointed Joe Clark as an ideal hero for white America. Knock the black kids into line! Shout at them with a bullhorn! Walk through the corridors with a baseball bat in your hand! And if they can't learn or if they cause you trouble, kick them out! Well, I'm told that three quarters of the kids Clark expelled are now in jail. He was an ideal prison warden if you want to turn schools into prisons. And he was praised by the White House. He has now moved on from education to giving lectures. I hear he gets high fees.

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to your visits to schools around the country, what else did you find?

[A] Kozol: I visited an elementary school in the Bronx that doesn't even have a school building; it's in an indoor skating rink---low ceilings, no windows, five classes in an undivided room. They pack thirteen hundred black kids and eight hundred Hispanic kids into a building that can hold eight hundred at most.

In Chicago, I learned that, on an average day, one quarter of the teachers are substitutes. Even substitutes are in short supply. On a typical Monday or Friday morning in the spring, nearly 18,000 children come to class and find no teacher, not even a substitute. And because of financial cuts in Chicago, even these schools are drowning. Ninety percent of the supplies budget was cut. They are now rationing pencils, paper, even toilet paper. The kids have to bring toilet paper from home.

And in East St. Louis, people are suffering from the fumes of two huge chemical plants---one owned by Pfizer and the other by Monsanto. One student said to me, "This is a big country. Why do they have to bring all their poison here?"

[Q] Playboy: The East St. Louis story isn't a fair example. It's well known that the city is overwhelmed by corruption and mismanagement.

[A] Kozol: But the children have to live and go to school there. You can't blame the victims. Yes, the city is so poor that there hasn't been a garbage pickup in some parts in four years---it just lies piled up in the streets. But what about the chemical companies' responsibility? There is so much phosphorus in the soil that when kids ride their bikes across dry creek beds, there is spontaneous combustion. The sewage system explodes periodically.

There's a school there named Martin Luther King Junior High School. A student from a neighboring school---a seventh-grade girl---said to me, "We have a school full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains. Every child in the school is black. It's like a terrible joke on history." A seventh grader said that. In Great Neck, that child would share a class with seventeen others. Her teacher would get sixty thousand dollars a year, there would be carpeting on the floor, two hundred computers in the library, sixty thousand volumes of books available and one guidance counselor for every two hundred kids, as opposed to a ratio of one to one thousand in New York City.

I asked the chemistry teacher there what he most needed and he said chemicals. Here is a city drowning in chemical waste and he had no chemicals and no water! [Laughs] In the South Bronx, at Morris High School, the school was so poor that on rainy days there was literally a waterfall down the stairway, simply because they couldn't fix the roof. In Camden, New Jersey, there are computer classes but no computers. The kids use old manual typewriters and pretend they're computers.

[Q] Playboy: But hasn't education been this Administration's priority? Hasn't money been provided?

[A] Kozol: More money is put into prison construction than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what's more precious to us than our own children? We're going to build a lot more prisons if we don't deal with the schools and their inequalities. Right now, President Bush thinks he can contain all this by punitive measures. That's basically the Bill Bennett agenda: Build more prisons, get tough; more stick, less carrot. We have more people in prisons in proportion to our population than any other country in the world. We're not going to be able to build enough prisons to contain all these ruined human beings.

[Q] Playboy: So our school system is helping to create our prison population.

[A] Kozol: What we're seeing is the end of the Jeffersonian dream. We're seeing the end of any pretense at all of providing equal opportunity to rich children and poor children in this country. At present, a tiny percent of the population controls about half the wealth. That is an extraordinary development in a democracy. The children of the poor have only one chance in a thousand of ever rising beyond their class. Their destinies have been determined before they enter school. There could not be a darker scenario for the United States. The affluent people believe they're secure and that the inner-city kids won't cause them any trouble. They feel sure that they will continue to kill one another off in gang wars, or die through disease, like AIDS, or through drug addiction. But that's not going to be true forever. At some point, these unjustly decimated kids are going to turn their anger outward. They're not naive. The kids at Morris High School told me, "People think we don't know what we're missing, but we have eyes and we can see, and we have hearts and we can feel."

[Q] Playboy: What else contributes to our current social inequality?

[A] Kozol: The way our health-care system is run, the degrading conditions of housing for poor children---the poor have no place in America anymore. Since President Reagan was in office---and, more vividly, since President Bush came to office---government policy has increasingly ceased to address questions of equality. The buzzword now is excellence. Excellence has become a code word for "retreat from the dreams of equality and of an end to segregation." People drone on with interminable speeches about the need to get tough with kids---more examinations, more discipline in the schools. They don't even breathe a whisper about segregation or race or equality.

[Q] Playboy: Some schools, which are presumably supported by members of the black community, choose to teach to black male children only. Doesn't this indicate that there is some desire within the community to remain segregated?

[A] Kozol: The Reagan and Bush Administrations have been very successful in creating a farm team of conservative blacks who will say the things that right-wing white people used to say. There are entire battalions of young black intellectuals who have been nurtured by the Reagan and Bush Administrations---and by their friends in the right wing---to sustain the present inequities in this country. They have found a handful of blacks who will say they don't want desegregation. But if you talk to ordinary black families, you will find that exactly the reverse is true. When you give black families the chance to send their children to top-notch white suburban schools, there are massive waiting lists.

[Q] Playboy: And the Administration is doing nothing about this?

[A] Kozol: Last spring, President Bush issued his educational blueprint for the year 2000 and there was not a word in it about racial segregation or equality in schooling. The President went so far as to say that money is not important. His exact words were, "Dollar bills don't educate students." That is a very consoling sentiment for a man whose parents sent him to Phillips Academy. I'm sure it gives him a better delusion of having achieved what he achieved on his own merit. In fact, Phillips Academy invests more than twenty thousand dollars a year in a kid like George Bush---which is five times what we spend on the poor black kids of Camden, the South Bronx. If money doesn't make the difference, why did George Bush's parents waste all that money? They must be crazy!

[Q] Playboy: Is George Bush deliberately insensitive?

[A] Kozol: For all the criticism Lyndon Baines Johnson received for Vietnam, in domestic affairs he was a great President. He tried, decently and out of a sense of conscience, to create a level playing field for poor children---not just black children but poor children. He created Head Start and Upward Bound. He created crucial assistance programs for poor children in this country. Those programs have been decimated by Bush and Reagan. Now there's no longer even a pretense, not even a blink. If you're born in Camden, New Jersey, you're a four-thousand-dollar baby; in Princeton, New Jersey, you're an eight-thousand-dollar baby; in Great Neck, you're a fifteen-thousand-dollar baby; and if you're in George Bush's class, you're a twenty-thousand-dollar baby.

[Q] Playboy: A recent study claims that the allocation of monies for the poor is deliberately low. Do you believe that it's premeditated?

[A] Kozol: No, I don't buy into the conspiracy theory. I've always believed that our society is tightly stratified and that a thousand mechanisms perpetuate these stratifications. The public schools, after ten years of the Reagan-Bush Administrations, now serve this function more overtly than they ever did before. But I refuse to believe that it is consciously intended. Look at one of the two top high schools in New York City: Stuyvesant High School. There are twenty-six hundred and forty-two children; only one hundred and twenty-three of them are black. Now, that's an excellent example of conspiracy of effect but certainly not a conspiracy of intent. If you understand that the students were admitted solely on merit, then examine the backgrounds of the white students, you'll find that they were provided advantages that black children are not. Poor children don't have preschool education. There is discrepancy among their elementary schools; there are culturally loaded tests. All of these contribute to deny opportunity to poorer children. And, in addition, the parents of the poor, who are victims of the same system, offer no support. I would never reduce it to a simple conspiracy.

[Q] Playboy: That still seems vague. If there is no conscious conspiracy, how do you explain the politically directed allocation of resources that you have already pointed out?

[A] Kozol: The reason the state legislatures always try to obstruct, delay or countermand court orders to equalize school funds is that most legislators, and certainly the most powerful ones, are accountable to relatively privileged people, so they are directly serving their interests. If the poorest children receive the same resources as the privileged, there would be less room at top-rated colleges for the privileged. The privileged would have to compete against many more children who would give them a run for their money.

[Q] Playboy: So you say there's a deliberate attempt to limit access for the poor?

[A] Kozol: Well, it's not malevolent. The affluent suburbs do not wish the children of the poor ill. They simply want the most for their own children. But to the children in the South Bronx, it's all the same. The reason why they come up shortchanged doesn't matter to them.

[Q] Playboy: But you portray the poor as ennobled and the privileged as unprincipled scoundrels.

[A] Kozol: The thing is, I don't believe that any rich person wishes poor children harm. Rich people would never put their kids out on the little-league field and say, "We're going to rig the game for our children; our kids will wear baseball mitts, the poor kids will play with bare hands." We would never say that. We would find that obnoxious. We wouldn't rig a baseball game the way we rig schooling in America. Yet we do permit that rigging in our public schools. And while I don't think that it's deliberate or conspiratorial, it amounts to a conspiracy of effect.

So it's a systemic conspiracy. The economics intervene without it being necessary to intervene invidiously. That makes a mockery out of what democracy is all about. Admittedly, rich people have a right to buy extras for their children and they have the right to enjoy their wealth. But we don't have the right to do that to our public school system. If rich people want to opt out of democracy, then they'd better spend the money to send their kids to prep school. The public school system is the last possible arena for democracy. It's the last place where we promised to give kids an equal shot. Not to do that is an injustice, an evil.

[Q] Playboy: Several lawsuits are currently being introduced to redress the problem of inequitable funding. How do you feel about that?

[A] Kozol: There's a school-equity suit pending in New York State, as well as suits in about twenty other states. If this issue is ever forced in the courts, If would be interesting to see how the rich suburbs respond. It would give us an answer to the question that lies at the heart of all my writing: "Does this nation really believe in fair play?" Perhaps the answer is obvious. I'm not sure.

[Q] Playboy: Is it ultimately the political indifference of the poor that creates inequity?

[A] Kozol: The parents of the poor have little opportunity to make their political will known. Many don't vote. And those who do vote, vote poorly because they're badly educated. They are products of the same system.

[Q] Playboy: A circle of ignorance?

[A] Kozol: Yes. The White House has proposed this America 2000 plan. The purpose of this plan is to create, around the country, a model network of successful schools in order to find out "what works." The proposition is, of course, that once we find out what works, we'll act upon it. Well, I understand that the current Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander, has high Presidential ambitions, and if he is trying to position himself for a candidacy around the year 2000, he will have to face the consequences of the failure of this program. George Bush will not; he has wisely chosen to be out of power when the failures of the plan are realized.

[Q] Playboy: So you have great doubts about America 2000.

[A] Kozol: I would emphasize this to those in the White House who would listen: We already know a lot of things that work which we refuse to act upon. Head Start works---it makes a spectacular difference. The President knows this, the Secretary of Education has conceded this. But they still refuse to provide it to many of the children who need it. They are unwilling to pay for it. The main function of research in social policy in the United States is a mechanism for eternal postponement of action. Very seldom does it create a mandate to act on anything. The President's statement that we don't have enough money to fund Head Start is preposterous---and as implausible as his statements on other matters. It's as implausible as his having said that Clarence Thomas was the most qualified candidate for the Supreme Court and that the nomination had nothing to do with race. You know, the President is the prime practitioner of affirmative action: One black man out, one in---Marshall out, Thomas in.

[Q] Playboy: How do you manage to keep a positive outlook about all this?

[A] Kozol: Look, in the context of almost universal misery, we have two choices: We throw our hands up because we don't know how to deal with it, or we can jump in and carve out one area where we know the answer and have the means to make a difference. If I didn't believe the schools alone could be a transformative course, even with all the obstacles on every side, I wouldn't be a teacher and I wouldn't write about education. My life's work has rested on the premise that no matter how grim the context---no matter how many teenage mothers there are or how much drug use, violence, illness or despair there is---a spectacular public school can make the difference. I refuse to buy into the myth that I call "the endless circle of causation." I hear it all the time: No matter what you do, there are so many other things wrong with their lives that it won't make a difference. Wherever I stand on the circle of causation, the lever of change must be somewhere else. Well, that is an axiom of impotence.

[Q] Playboy: The idea is to pull the switch wherever you stand, right?

[A] Kozol: Yes. I simply refuse to accept ethical impotence. Whether that's arrogant or not, I refuse. If I were in public housing, I would have a sign on the wall behind my desk: Housing is the lever of change. If I were a doctor, I would say that public health makes the difference.

[Q] Playboy: Is it that simple---all you need is a little activism?

[A] Kozol: Granted, there are infinitely complex causative factors in the other areas. There are so many related forces at work in the drug problem: the historic willingness of white crime syndicates to target black communities, government drug policy, lack of treatment facilities, et cetera. And nobody has the answer. Bill Bennett's entire political career rested on his finding the answer and he utterly failed. But we know exactly what would make the difference in public schooling.

[Q] Playboy: And that is?

[A] Kozol: We know that a good teacher in the country's inner cities would teach better in a class of twenty kids instead of forty. We know that kids learn better in a building that doesn't have rain leaking from the ceiling. We know that kids will learn better if they have a teacher to go to. We know that kids don't learn a great deal of physics if the school doesn't have a physics lab. They learn more chemistry in a chemistry class that has chemicals. We know that if a school doesn't have an advanced placement course and another school has eighteen advanced placement courses, the kids at the latter school have a better chance of going to college. And this we can do--we can act now!

[Q] Playboy: What would you do if you were offered a job in this Administration?

[A] Kozol: Well, first, no one's going to offer me a job in this Administration. Maybe in twenty years, if Mario Cuomo or Tom Harkin were President. But if I were the Secretary of Education, the first thing I would do would be to convince the nation to get rid of property-tax funding for schools. That simply creates a hereditary meritocracy. Start out with a level playing field for all children in public schools. And I would immediately ask Congress to raise the federal expenditure from its present five percent to twenty-five percent. I would say, "The nation's at risk and we have to pay the bill." And I would get the rest of the public school funding from state income taxes.

[Q] Playboy: You didn't answer the question. Would you take a job with the current Administration?

[A] Kozol: Of course, yeah, I'd love to be able to use the authority of the White House to exhort and transform. I mean, one of the things that's frustrating to me is that few people who share my beliefs have any voice of power in this country. The entire school agenda, like the entire poverty agenda, is orchestrated either by the hard-right ideologues at places such as the Heritage Foundation, or else by cynical and world-weary neoconservatives who reminisce nostalgically about the days of their youth, when they were liberals in the Sixties---who basically exploit those memories to sweeten the pill of their presently vindictive policies.

[Q] Playboy: Your solutions sound good on the surface, but the economy is in such straits that resources simply aren't available. You can't fund the school system with honorable intentions.

[A] Kozol: We could say, "Look, the Cold War is over. We're not going to take any more time with that, so let's get started on education. We're going to bring home our troops from around the world. We're going to increase the Peace Corps twentyfold. We're going to save the country one hundred billion dollars, then target that money for social policies, including the twenty poorest school districts in the country." That might do it. If we could afford to spend fifty billion dollars in the Persian Gulf, then we can afford five billion dollars to do this.

[Q] Playboy: What about the defense-policy interests? A lot of people would be out of jobs.

[A] Kozol: We could take the people from the defense industry and put them to work building schools. We'd put all this terrific technology into creating school systems in the inner cities. We'd make them so good that white people would pull their kids out of the prep schools and put them in schools in the South Bronx. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: George Herbert Walker Bush the Fourth, attending Martin Luther King Junior High in East St. Louis?

[A] Kozol: That's what is so bewildering. We are being lectured by all these right-wing characters from the Heritage Foundation and similar think tanks on the virtues of the unregulated free market, then being encouraged to extend the magic of the market to the public school system. That's the ethos behind the new idea of using vouchers to attend private schools. But why should the free market work any better in schooling than it does in housing the poor? The free market doesn't work in terms of health care, it doesn't even work in the purchase of food for poor people. The private-banking system does not work for the poor. There's a political democracy, but there's no economic democracy in this country.

[Q] Playboy: The disparity between rich and poor is becoming larger, and the lower middle class is rapidly shrinking. If you're correct, working-class whites will soon experience the same inequity.

[A] Kozol: Yes. The extremes of wealth and poverty, of privilege and misery, are now far greater than at any previous time in my life. Even in the dormant Fifties, the gray age of Eisenhower, it was not this bad. The working class is submerging into the lower class. You can see it right here, around these little towns in Massachusetts. Rowley, an all-white working-class town near here, is spending only about twenty-six hundred dollars a year per pupil. They are decimated by federal and state cuts and by the recession. The federal government is opting out on them now. They are spending less there than in Mississippi. These white kids will be an underclass a few years from now. A lot of white families are landing in homeless shelters now. The kids won't have an education to be able to land a decent job.

[Q] Playboy: And the consequences?

[A] Kozol: They will perceive themselves to be in competition with the poor black and Hispanic. You'll have working-class whites increasingly disenfranchised, increasingly close to the financial edge. Unfortunately, neither the poor blacks nor the poor whites will aim their anger where it ought to be aimed---at the supremely wealthy people who profited immensely during the Eighties and Nineties, saw their taxes cut and still don't have to pay a serious capital-gains tax. They won't resent them because they don't understand what's happening to themselves. They can't measure this year's promises against last year's deceptions because they're too poorly educated. They can't read history.

[Q] Playboy: You're talking about the trite messages that promise hope just to keep people placid?

[A] Kozol: Absolutely, absolutely. You know, basically a very small percentage of the population pays for the conservative political advertisements that keep electing people like George Bush. President Bush doesn't need to be accountable to the poor; they can't finance his campaign. He's accountable to the ones who give him ten thousand dollars or one hundred thousand dollars to get him reelected. So he really has no need to temper his messages to appeal to the losers in this unfair game.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe it's too dangerous to educate the poor.

[A] Kozol: People believe that---and sometimes I do. I met a fellow in San Antonio, a professor at Trinity University, who told me about Alamo Heights, a self-contained, upper-class enclave that has a separate school system. This fellow said to me, "If we gave all these poor Hispanic kids in San Antonio the same terrific schools that we have, who would be there to trim the lawns and scrub the kitchen floors for the people in Alamo Heights? Who would do the dirty work of this society?"

[Q] Playboy: But isn't that typical of most societies?

[A] Kozol: Various business leaders have said that we need a well-educated work force in order to compete, but I'm not so sure they mean that. Is that really true? They can hire people to assemble baseballs in Haiti for four dollars a day, while here they would have to pay that an hour. When I see large numbers of black men standing idle in cities around the country, I wonder if there is any longer a need for them in our society. I once asked that of Congressman Augustus Hawkins, who retired recently. He was chairman of the House Labor and Education Committee, and he said, sadly, "What do you do with a former slave when you no longer need his labor?" The question is, do we value the children of the poor any longer, or are they expendable? Well, we have written them off. We have decided they have no moral claim on us and no economic utility. We don't want to get near them. And now, with AIDS, we have a vivid metaphor for keeping them at a distance.

[Q] Playboy: If that's the reality, then why fight so hard?

[A] Kozol: School kids all across the country say the same thing every morning. They put their hands over their hearts, look at the flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance. They speak about one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. I'd like to believe that some day the most affluent people in this country, and particularly their children, will decide it's time to make this promise come true. The business logic sees children only for their future utilitarian value. We ought to value children because they are fragile, vulnerable, beautiful. Because childhood places unique demands upon us, and the most precious demand ought to be a period of happiness. That's the only argument I care to give. I try to portray a vision of what a just society should do, could do or would do. That's all I'm trying to do in life. I can't say any more. Is that enough?

"I spent four years in Paris writing fiction---most of which ended up in the Seine."