Kozol Scores Boston Schools And Harvard's Apathetic Role

(Following is an excerpt from onathan Kozol's controversial speech delivered last Sunday at the Ford Hall Forum. Kozol, a Harvard graduate currently teaching in Newton, was fired from the Boston School System in 1965 for reading a poem by Langston Hughes to his largely Negro class. His book, Death at an Early Age, was published recently.)

In my school I see pictures on the wall. I see pictures of Spain and a pictures of Portofino and a pictures of Chicago. I see arithmetic paper a spellings paper. I see a star chart. I see the flag of our America. The classroom is dirty... The auditorium is dirty the seats are dusty. The light the auditorium is brok. The curtains in the auditorium are ragged they took the curtains down because they was so ragged. The bathroom is dirty ... The cellar is dirty the hold school is dirty sometime ... The flowers are dry every thing in my school is so so dirty.

When the history of the United States in the twentieth century is written, the City of Boston is going to deserve an ugly chapter all its own--and the most painful paragraphs within that chapter will be those which describe the educational genocide being carried out to this day with the full knowledge of many people within the Boston Public Schools.

The subject of our discussion is the future of the public schools in Boston. We cannot talk about the possibilities of the future without first documenting both the agonies of the present and the disasters of the past. It is this, then, which I will take to be my responsibility this evening.

Two years ago, when I was fired from the Boston schools, I spoke of conditions that I found there in a tone of outraged innocence. Today I still have plenty of outrage, but I no longer am innocent. After two years of teaching the corruption, lies and overt racism of the people who dominate the Boston School Committee, and who hold supervisory positions within its administration, it is quite impossible to feel innocent or wide-eyed.

Here is a school system which takes young Negro kids at grade level and turns them out retarded.

A school system in which the children of ghetto classes are burdened year upon year with unbroken lines of substitute teachers--teachers unfit, unprepared, inexperienced, teachers who are not teachers, teachers who are fill-ins, who are temporary, who work at night or after school in other jobs, who do not know children, who do not know education, who are not concerned, who are not involved, who do not and cannot care about the lives expiring before them.

All systems use substitutes when regular teachers are unwell. But the ghetto schools of Boston bear the sinister distinction of having used substitutes in place of regular teachers in dozens of ghetto classrooms month after month, year after year. I have known children who have had as many as 25 substitute teachers in three months. I have known children who have not had one, single, serious, permanent, competent, fully trained teacher during the course of three full years.

Those children who do get permanent teachers--it might as well be said now--are at times scarcely more fortunate. It is close to heresy in Boston to speak badly of the teachers. The word is out that we are to call them dedicated. The message has been given even to our daily press that, whatever else is wrong, the regular teachers are good-hearted, serious, and capable.

I would like to be absolutely frank.

They are not all serious.

They are not all capable.

Many are anything but good-hearted.

There are always, of course, a certain number of good teachers.

There are far too many, however, who should never in their lives be allowed to go near children, and certainly not near children whose color they despise. How they get to them--how they have been slotted in these classrooms--by what process of political string-pulling they have ended up here, most of us will never know. But the fact remains--it is a bitter one indeed--that the Boston schools are riddled with mediocre, unwell, ignorant and brutal teachers. Alcoholism, creeping senility, mental instability in permanent faculty members are thoroughly documented, known well both to children and to school department officials, and continue uncorrected to the present time.

One junior high, famous for its dreadful teaching, famous for the hatred that its pupils wisely bear their teachers, has in its ranks to the present hour and present day a man so lost to the consumption of whiskey and cheap wine that pupils and fellow teachers alike make jokes about it. One boy who stayed out playing hookey for a few days returned at length and, with a smile on his face, was able to justify his reason for returning in these words: "I got tired of seeing all the winos on the street. I though I'd come back to school to see and educated wino."

At other schools, overt racism has been common. Teachers new to the system are appalled by the conversations, by the style of easy and automatic condescension, by the casual assumption of inherent inferiority in the black children and in their lives and families.

Physical conditions have outpaced all descriptions of their squalor. Black-boards have collapsed; windows have been nailed-shut; classes have been packed into foul-smelling cellars and unpartitioned auditoriums. Teaching has taken place in areas where it has been a continuing struggle merely to breathe fresh air and to hear a child when he talks.

Money for repairs, for improvement, for uplifting, has gone instead to political purposes, to salary raises for our lady School Committee member's retainers, to placate her custodians, to reward her principals, to reward the Superintendent himself for his steadfast dedication to the morbid status quo for which she and he equally stand. All evidence, all confirmation of the inferior status of the ghetto schools has geen ignored, denied, refuted. Even the blunt fact of racial segregation, known well to anyone in the schools dealing with normal vision, went for many years unadmitted and was repeatedly denied.

The Interim Report on Racial Imbalance signed in 1964 by the heads of Brandeis, Northeastern, Boston University, MIT, and the Christian Science Monitor, and by Boston's Roman Catholic leader, Arch. Carinal Cushing, indicated that there were 45 schools in Boston with over 50 per cent non-white, 28 with over 80 per cent, 16 with 96 per cent or above. Among the highest in the city: the William Lloyd Garrison School, with 96.8 per cent non-white. One school (the Hyde) had 99.1 per cent. One: 99.5 per cent. One (the Lewis annex) did not have one child who was white.

Other statistics, prepared and endorsed by many of the outstanding religious leaders in the area, have demonstrated financial inequalities between the predominantly white and Negro schools.

10 per cent lower textbook expenditures.

19 per cent lower library expenditures.

27 per cent lower health expenditures per pupil.

In schools with over 90 per cent Negroes, eight out of nine major items were lower than in comparable white schools.

In schools with an all white student body, the average ran up to $350 allocated per pupil per year. In three heavily Negro districts, averages were $240, $235, $232.

In-class expenditures for Boston as a whole averaged $275 per pupil. In the Negro schools: $213.

It has been made apparent as well that Negro areas also have the highest percentage of provisional teachers, those who are fill-ins, have no tenure, no seniority, no experience and no obligation to remain.

In the face of such evidence, in defiance of the editorial positions taken by both major Boston papers, Louise Day Hicks has consistently stuck to her guns in defending the superiority of the neighborhood school, even when that school was an insult to its own neighborhood, a scar, a cancer, detested, hated, feared. "I believe that little children should go to school in their own neighborhoods, with the children with whom they play. It is as simple as that."

Others on the School Committee have expressed similar attitudes, some of them more direct. One member, William O'Connor, has made public utterances as can leave no possible uncertainty as to what he thinks of Negro children: "We have no inferior education in our schools. What we have been getting is an inferior type of student."

With such allies at her side, Mrs. Hicks has been able to block almost every serious effort that has been made to improve the ghetto schools and, confronted by a recent state law specifically indicating financial penalties for segregated systems, she has been able to stall the wheels with sufficient success to prevent any meaningful improvement and not lose a penny of state aid for Boston's budget.

...Joseph Alsop wrote recently: "Of the more than 400,000 Negro boys and girls who reach 18 each year, hardly 10 per cent are given an education reaching the white standards."

Wherever that 10 per cent may be, it is apparent by now that they are not in Boston. Here in this city, as in so much of this violent and unjust and undemocratic nation, Negro children every day of their lives are denied an equal share in the advertised pleasures of their country. Negro kids enter Bostons ghetto schools with the same expectations and the same motivations as children all over America. They come, as other children do, with faces bright, with hopes held high, with energy, with dreams, with expectation. For six years, eight years, ten years, 12 years, they face a grim array of hostile teachers. To the reaching hands of the children are given dry and thankless texts, books long outdated, unloved, unlovely, books teachers can respect no more than can their pupils, books from which few children learn and from which no child should.

They come in hopeful, credulous. They leave, hearts broken, hating, filled with cynicism: a cynicism, however, which is never quite equal to that which our unjust white society breeds, fosters and deserves.

Meanwhile, over in Cambridge, and in other academic circles, the dilettantes of education play intellectual games and talk cleverly of cultural deprivation. They write government proposals, requesting funds for pilot programs, involving themselves in the agony of the ghetto to the same degree and with the same embarrassed caution that delicate ladies use when they dip their toes into the edges of cold or unfamiliar waters. Denying its historic role of protest, the University of Harvard stands comfortably in brick and ivy on the safe side of the Charles River, enjoying the passage of another football season, and talking politely at congenial cocktail parties about the unfortunate problems of the unfortunate children of the ghetto.

To the extent that Harvard does involve itself in the ghetto, it is primarily under the aegis of the rotting schools themselves, in the context of Boston-run compensatory projects which use the name of Harvard in acquiring government money, profit perhaps from an occasional flash of insight, but which in raw fact make little or no dent upon the lives of any detectable number of black children and instead serve mainly to tie up Harvard's hands, the scholars themselves becoming hostage to the School Committee, arming it with prestige, tricking it out with bits of academia, and keeping the once-brave voice of Harvard silent, and its corporate mouth closed.

It is, I may add, as a graduate of Harvard and one who has often been obliged to apologize for its apathy before the anger of the Negro community, that I lodge this charge of moral failure and ethical cowardice at those who dictate policy for the University, above all the President and Deans. We have yet to discover how our nation's outstanding place of learning can sit back in brick oblivion and course-book apathy and watch America's Number One Norern Segregationist chart her way to power not seven minutes distant, not five miles off. In this Harvard shows itself no different perhaps than the society of which it is a product. No more and no less than the white bigot of South Boston, or the raw-voiced howling redneck of Alabama, the genial scholars of education and urban problems leave their offices at Harvard, step into their attractive little cars and drive off to their isolated white homes in segregated suburbs.

We are all to blame.

We are all involved at once.

We are involved not in a modest problem of reasonable dimensions, but in a major agony of revolutionary proportion.

We all know--but few of us speak, less of us care, none of us act.

In the face of gross racial segregation, the weak-kneed liberals on our State Board of Education have given up all leverage and released state funds in return for token gestures. As a result, the Negro population has turned it upon itself and found its salvation only in the lream of a black community governing the lives of black children, educating black kids in black classrooms under black teachers and headmasters. It is not surprising that this has happened and, in many respects, it is probably just as well. Whether we like it or not, in any event, the time has passed when the white community can any longer call the signals. We have not the choice--and we have forfeited the right--to tell the Negroes what to do about their children's lives. We can no longer call for mild styles of Sunday-morning brotherhood and moderation.

There has been too much moderation.

There have been truckloads of reasoned understanding.

There has been a whole decade of gentle and unoffending condemnation of the Boston Public Schools.

It is time for the gentle to move over and for the unoffending to admit that they have failed. A black revolution is upon us. Black people will now take their destiny into their own hands. They will not wait. They will not go slowly. They will not say, Thank you kindly. They will not look down politely at the floor.

They will save their children from the murder that the people in this audience (as citizens of Massachusetts) have unpardonably permitted--and they will not listen when you tell them to go slow.

There is a strong poem written by a black poet and it is a poem from which I would like to read to you. The name of the poem is DEMOCRACY. The man who wrote the poem was Langston Hughes. He speaks of the white people who tell him to go slowly. He says this is a thing he cannot do. His people are dying. His life has been a prison. His skin has marked him forever as a man who was not free to live and breathe. He is not sure what Democracy should mean--but he knows he does not have it.

Democracy will not come

Today, this year

Nor ever

Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right

As the other fellow has

To stand

On my two feet

And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,

Let things take their course.

Tomorrow is another day.

I do not need my freedom when

I'm dead.

I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

Freedom

Is a strong seed

Planted

In a great need.

I live here, too.

I want freedom

Just as you