Jonathan Kozol Quotes

The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.
Jonathan Kozol

Cause, Lack, Housing

We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.
Jonathan Kozol

Time, Death, School

We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.
Jonathan Kozol

Children, Evil, Worst

When I was young, I was religious.
Jonathan Kozol

Young, Religious

Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.
Jonathan Kozol

Wonderful, Themselves, State

By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.
Jonathan Kozol

Success, Failure, School

I believe we need a national amendment which will guarantee every child in America the promise of not just an equal education but a high-quality equal education.
Jonathan Kozol

Education, America, Child

I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be 'fixed' - I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engines - ever asks the opinions of teachers.
Jonathan Kozol

Hate, Word, Opinions

No Child Left Behind's fourth-grade gains aren't learning gains, they're testing gains. That's why they don't last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.
Jonathan Kozol

Learning, Law, Why

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.
Jonathan Kozol

Great, Experience, Children

As a matter of record, New York City spends a higher portion of its budget on instruction and associated costs within the schools themselves than any of the other 100 largest districts in the nation.
Jonathan Kozol

Matter, Nation, Themselves

At present, black children are more segregated in their public schools than at any time since 1968. In the inner-city schools I visit, minority children typically represent 95 percent to 99 percent of class enrollment.
Jonathan Kozol

Time, Children, Black

But when I went to Harvard, it kind of got washed out of me, partly because people made fun of you in college. If you said you believed in God, they would look at you clinically, you know, suggest that you needed a referral.
Jonathan Kozol

Congress has an opportunity to take advantage of the opening created by Justice Kennedy later this year when it reauthorizes the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Jonathan Kozol

Justice, Child, Year

Consider what it is like to go into a new classroom and to see before you suddenly, and in a way you cannot avoid recognizing, the dreadful consequences of a year's wastage of so many lives.
Jonathan Kozol

Before, Cannot, Year

During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed.
Jonathan Kozol

Education, Time, Black

Governor Romney has said nothing about preschool. I think that giving the poorest kids in America wonderful preschool, and three years of it, starting when they are two-and-a-half, is absolutely crucial.
Jonathan Kozol

Nothing, Giving, America

Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.
Jonathan Kozol

Today, Children, Student

I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima; 60 percent were either ten years old or older.
Jonathan Kozol

Old, Once, Older

I think a lot of people don't have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students.
Jonathan Kozol

School, Become, Honest

I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: 'Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.'
Jonathan Kozol

Book, Thought, City

I'd love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I'd love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.
Jonathan Kozol

Love, School, Used

If we allow public funds to be used to support our relatively benign, morally grounded schools, we will have to allow those public funds to be used for any type of private school.
Jonathan Kozol

School, Used, Support

In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.
Jonathan Kozol

School, Children, Job

Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs.
Jonathan Kozol

Future, Children, Blessings

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Writer

Born: September 5, 1936

Links

Find on Amazon: Jonathan Kozol

Cite this Page: Citation

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