November 11, 1991

Jonathan Kozol spoke in Avery Hall on his recent book, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. Telling his audience, Jennifer Rappaport ’93 wrote in The Miscellany News, that “He is shocked,” that legislators “think it bizarre” to suggest “that money is the solution to poverty,” Kozol laid out six actions that needed to be taken if the country’s school systems were to become effective: universal access of all eligible three and four-year-olds to the Head Start program; capping enrollment in all classes at 20 students; teachers’ payscales that rose inversely to the level of poverty of those they taught; remediation of decayed facilities through a Federal School Construction Bill; strict government oversight of equity of educational access and quality—“he believes in justice, not the charity of rich people”—and abolishment of property taxes as the primary means of public education. The lecture was presented as a part of the campus lecture series, Issues for the 90s.

Kozol spoke at Vassar in 1968 about his controversial first book, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (1967), written after Kozol, a substitute teacher in Boston, was discharged for reading African-American poetry to a fourth-grade class. He also spoke at the college in November 1972 and November 1973.