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On Mondays and Fridays in early May, nearly 18,000 children-the equivalent of all the elementary students in suburban Glencoe, Wilmette, Glenview, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Deerfield, Highland Park and Evanston-are assigned to classes with no teacher.

Jonathan Kozol

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Jonathan Kozol
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: September 5
Author
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Teaching
Monday
Teacher
Friday
Highland
Class
Park
Fridays
May
Classes
Mondays
Children
Parks
Suburban
Nearly
Assigned
Early
Elementary
Students
Equivalent

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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.
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I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.
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You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
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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.'
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There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old accountable for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.
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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?
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I have been criticized throughout the course of my career for placing too much faith in the reliability of children's narratives but I have almost always found that children are a great deal more reliable in telling us what actually goes on in public school than many of the adult experts who develop policies that shape their destinies.
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It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year.
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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.
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I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
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We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.
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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.
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The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.
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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.
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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.
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Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.
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Let's concede that we have decided to let our children grow up in two separate nations, and lead two separate kinds of lives. If, on the other hand, we have the courage to rise to this challenge to name what's happening within our inner-city schools, then we also need the courage to be activist and go out and fight like hell to change it.
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East St. Louis-which the local press refers to as an inner city without an outer city-has some of the sickest children in America. Of 66 cities in Illinois, East St. Louis ranks first in fetal death, first in premature birth, and third in infant health.
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