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The White House, in advancing the agenda for a [school] choice plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very poor to lend their credence to a market system that has proved so obdurate and so resistant to their pleas at every turn?

Jonathan Kozol

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Jonathan Kozol
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: September 5
Author
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Every
Turns
Market
Mechanisms
Poor
Plan
Lend
Faith
Choice
Advancing
White
Plans
Rests
Black
Turn
Proved
Obdurate
House
System
Agenda
Pleas
School
Education
Agendas
Credence
Reason
Choices
Mechanism
Resistant

More quotes by Jonathan Kozol

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The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - 'state indoctrination.'
Jonathan Kozol
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If there are amazing graces on this earth, I believe that they are these good children sent to us by God and not yet soiled by the knowledge that their nation does not love them.
Jonathan Kozol
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We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.
Jonathan Kozol
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When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.
Jonathan Kozol
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Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.
Jonathan Kozol
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I do get scared about the physical danger from drug dealers. But it's not in the same league as the danger I feel eating an $80 lunch with my privileged friends to discuss hunger and poverty. That's when my soul feels imperiled.
Jonathan Kozol
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Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There's a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession - and I don't find that to be true at all.
Jonathan Kozol
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Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.
Jonathan Kozol
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In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.
Jonathan Kozol
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You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
Jonathan Kozol
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President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.
Jonathan Kozol
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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
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Competitive skills are desperately needed by poor children in America, and realistic recognition of the economic roles that they may someday have an opportunity to fill is obviously important, too. But there is more to life, and there ought to be much more to childhood, than readiness for economic functions.
Jonathan Kozol
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Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.
Jonathan Kozol
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If you could lead through testing, the U.S. would lead the world in all education categories. When are people going to understand you don't fatten your lambs by weighing them?
Jonathan Kozol
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Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.
Jonathan Kozol
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A dream does not die on its own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives.
Jonathan Kozol
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The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory.
Jonathan Kozol
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I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.
Jonathan Kozol
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The rich...should beg the poor to forgive us for the bread we bring them. Healthy people sometimes feel they need to beg forgiveness too, although there is no reason why. Maybe we simply ask forgiveness for not being born where these poor women have been born, knowing that if we lived here too, our fate might well have been the same.
Jonathan Kozol