Jonathan Kozol is hungry.
The acclaimed nonfiction writer and urban-education activist is on a self-imposed quasi-hunger strike over the state of the nation’s schools.
“This is the worst moment, the most perilous and most dangerous moment in terms of racial justice that I have seen in our public schools since 1968,” he said in a recent telephone interview from his Boston home.
Kozol, 71, has a new book, “Letters to a Young Teacher” about an ongoing correspondence he had with a new first- grade teacher. He will speak and sign books at 7:30 tonight at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Lower Downtown.
Kozol is protesting the federal No Child Left Behind act, which is up for reauthorization, and a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down voluntary programs to integrate public schools.
“I felt everything that I worked toward my whole life was ripped to shreds,” he said. “I grew very angry. I felt that the divisions between the races were being compounded. I just thought I needed to kind of go on a fast of what I would call protest and repentance.”
It is a partial fast to clear his spirit of anger, he said.
“My doctor insists I have liquid and a genuine meal from time to time; otherwise fasting can do damage to your heart,” he said. “Pink lemonade is my favorite nutriment.”
Kozol has written about urban education and social justice issues in such award-winning books as 1995’s “Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation” and 1992’s “Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools.”
He has become an outspoken critic of standardized testing that is a major component of No Child Left Behind and continues his four-decade-long battle for equity in schools.
“Denver is right up there among the most deeply segregated school districts in the nation,” he said.
The city has had a long struggle with education integration. In 1973, the Supreme Court ordered desegregation in Denver Public Schools, forcing the district into busing – a policy that was lifted in 1995.
Since then, according to a 2006 Harvard University study, the races have separated once again.
Only 27 percent of whites in 2004 attended a school with 70 percent minority population, according to the study. But 84 percent of Latinos and 74 percent of blacks attended those “minority schools,” the study shows.
Denver is undergoing a massive reform effort, but Kozol said it will be difficult without integration.
“Superintendents of major segregated school systems have the toughest jobs in America,” he said. “I have seen hundreds of these plans. By and large, they have tended to receive an initial burst of enthusiastic praise. Then three to five years later we find the plan has been abandoned because it had no long-term success.”
Kozol said the way to improve schools is by giving teachers time, the space to be creative and smaller classrooms. Six years of No Child Left Behind has not improved inner-city schools, he said.
“I believe No Child Left Behind, far from reducing the achievement gap, has dramatically widened the cultural gap between two separate classes in the society,” he said. “The only ultimate solution is a passionate revival of the political struggles of the civil rights era.
“If we want to close the achievement gap, nothing, not tests, not AYPs (adequate yearly progress) or any regimented terror counts as much as the high morality of the teachers and the small sizes of classes.”
