48 pages • 1 hour read
Jonathan KozolSavage Inequalities
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: "Children of the City Invincible: Camden, New Jersey"
Chapter 4 creates another comparison between the town of Camden, New Jersey, and the neighboring suburb of Cherry Hill. Within this comparison, Kozol attacks the argument that money "doesn't buy better education," made in a Wall Street Journal editorial. The argument made is that the material disparities in education are of lesser importance than culture and values. However, Kozol's rebuttal to this argument is not that money is irrelevant, but that these material disparities and inequities affect students in both tangible and intangible ways. Kozol uses the comparison between Camden and Cherry Hill to illustrate the weaknesses of the Wall Street Journal argument.
Camden, New Jersey is a city in deep economic and social distress. Once a vital commercial and industrial city, most of the industries have departed. Most of the jobs in Camden, Kozol notes, are not held by Camden residents. Five hundred of the city's 2,200 public-housing units are boarded up. The streets cave in from disrepair, and there are no funds for permanent fixes. The schools lack modern science equipment and computers.
Kozol remarks that these dilapidated surroundings and diminished opportunities create cycles of failure, cycles that discourage and humiliate Camden's students and residents. This negative environment stems directly from the city's economic situation: Aside from RCA and Campbell's, only a trash incinerator and sewage-treatment offer employment, aside from two prisons. Because the city is so desperate for commercial opportunities, these industries pay little in taxes. Compared to Cherry Hill, there are few paths for Advanced Placement or extracurricular activities; the students have little in the way of actual competition. Even more humiliating, Camden is merely five minutes from Cherry Hill; indeed, many of the employees of Camden send their children to schools in Cherry Hill. In visiting schools in the city, Kozol finds repeated evidence of administrators and students beset by a host of problems, both from material deficiencies and social ills. What is constant in the Camden school system is a sense of frustration and futility.
Kozol details many of these complaints in an important historical event: a class-action suit brought forward by the parents of schoolchildren from Camden and the surrounding communities. The parents claimed that the disparity between the school systems failed to provide equal opportunity, whereas the defendants claimed that no additional funds could be asked for. These arguments were backed by a considerable number of elements opposed to any kind of redistribution: Some letter-writers went as far to claim that instead of funding, "values" were needed, and that the poor, predominantly Black or Hispanic children of Camden were beyond help. Taking any funds from richer districts would harm their own chances of competition, success, and "liberty." In the closing paragraphs of this chapter, Kozol remarks how the rhetoric of "liberty," typically raised in policies regarding "school choice"—like the rhetoric of "competition"—could mean one thing for one group, and something very different for another.
Chapter 4 Analysis
Building upon the mode established in the previous chapter, the fourth chapter of Savage Inequalities shifts its focus from the economic and social causes of the inequalities in education to the beliefs and attitudes that perpetuate these inequalities. Kozol investigates the actions and beliefs that justify and defend these systems of inequality, and the segregation they create. His goal is to find out what stops efforts to redistribute educational resources more fairly, and what frustrates the attempts to desegregate schools. Kozol discovers the answer lies as much in the denial of racism as its own outright expression. He points to an emphasis on "values" by conservative voices as a kind of codeword, one which allows those who employ it to justify their indifference and resistance.
Kozol begins this chapter as he does the prior chapter, laying out the material and financial discrepancies between Camden schools and their wealthy counterpart, Cherry Hill. At this point in the book, the reader can predict certain tropes: departed industry, industrial dumping sites, public health crises, crumbling school facilities. In addition to these familiar elements, Kozol illustrates an ubiquitous sense of futility among the students and faculty, one drawn from the acute sense of the overwhelming obstacles they face in teaching and learning in Camden. Kozol argues that this sense of futility among Camden's residents comes from the collective understanding of the gross inequality of their circumstances, versus those of their wealthy neighbors; this hypothesis is supported by the nearness of Camden to Cherry Hill—a mere five-minute drive.
Bringing together the accounts of students and teachers, Kozol's use of personal accounts undermine the narratives that cast poorer residents as unconcerned with education. Instead, the desperation of parents and teachers illustrates the disconnect between socioeconomic classes; this disconnect is the at the heart of Kozol's thesis. The ability for richer communities to decouple themselves from the fortunes of their poorer neighbors is based on this psychological and cultural disconnect. With respect to segregation, it is unclear in this chapter whether this disconnect is motivated by race, or if race is simply a method of intensifying a class-based disconnect. In any case, Kozol views this distinction as academic. However, as the chapter continues, Kozol makes clear that what enables these policies to persist, despite their incredible toll, is a mixture of contempt and indifference.
Perhaps the most interesting section of the chapter is its close, which documents Camden's residents' class-action law suit, alleging that the public-school system has failed them in providing the means to compete. Kozol outlines how the every-man-for-himself worldview resolves itself along class and racial lines. The findings, predictably, do not find evidence of intentional racial segregation. Kozol shows that the rhetoric supporting the status quo makes use of indifference, contempt, and fear: Integration and redistribution are seen as weakening more affluent children's ability to complete, forcing them to adjust their standards. This perspective views other peoples' children as deficient, or what's worse, expendable.
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