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Jonathan Kozol
Kids Who Beat the Odds

A book of hope from the author of Death at an Early Age.

For more than 30 years, Jonathan Kozol has used his writing to give voice to the dispossessed of American society. He has ventured where few Americans care to look, let alone spend time—homeless shelters, housing projects, inner city schools—offering unflinching portraits of adults and children facing poverty, racism, and the inequities of American life.

In Ordinary Resurrections, scheduled for release in May, Kozol offers us a different kind of book, an uplifting and personal look into the lives of young children in the South Bronx. He spoke recently with NEA Today’s Anita Merina.

Q: How is your new book different?
This isn’t a book with an agenda. My other books had agendas. Death at an Early Age was about racial segregation in schools. Rachel and Her Children was about the homeless. Savage Inequalities was about school finance. Amazing Grace was an effort to portray the social and medical conflicts of the poor. This book is the first time I have spent time with a child without wanting to get anything specific from the conversation. I wanted to describe what it was to be a kid in Carmen Suarez’ class. By working quietly for nearly five years, I was able to place the spotlight on the part of childhood I find most precious and the part of teaching I find most beautiful.

Q: Did you learn anything new?
Yes, I did. It’s taken me 30 years to learn that the title of my first book, Death at an Early Age, was wrong. These children don’t die. In Ordinary Resurrections, you have children who live in the South Bronx, the poorest district in the nation, with the highest rate of pediatric asthma, and they still do not die, even when we build walls of racial apartheid.

These children stand at the wall and light their lights and show us they will not be extinguished. That’s why I consider this book a sequel to Death at an Early Age. It’s the most hopeful book I’ve ever written.

Q: What is it about these children that helps them?
I think these kids have an extraordinary capacity to open up their hearts to strangers, to reignite their faith in life. There’s something very moving about the way kids like Elio and Pineapple refuse to live up to the morbid stereotypes that sociologists use to describe them.

But these are not poster children for the poor. They’re regular kids, and there are hundreds of thousands of kids like them in our cities.

Q: You’ve said this is the most cheerful book you’ve written about teachers. Why?
I like teachers, and, by and large, whether in wealthy or poor districts, I’m always stirred by the tremendous decency and kindness of teachers in public schools.

The teachers I write about in this book are not “super teachers.” They are good, solid human beings who do their job day after day with love and affection.

These are regular teachers in a good American school—not a fancy school funded by business, just a regular American school. And it’s a happy school, despite all the odds. The teachers I love most have grace. Their work is not proficiency and outcome, it’s poetry and ministry.

Q: What about the push for accountability that says these schools don’t stack up?
Well, I’m not a complete romantic. I know there must be standards and examinations. But exams are used in ways that are increasingly punitive. We don’t pay high salaries to these teachers. These children don’t have access to two years of preschool, nor do they have small class sizes or well-funded school libraries. Yet we subject these schools to the same standards as suburban schools.

These children are getting $8,000 invested in their school while another school receives $18,000. That’s not democracy. It’s punishing the children and the teachers of the poor, not for their sins, but for ours.

Q: Where does the standards movement fall short?
The best things that happen in public schools are the outcomes that can never be predicted. The most beautiful discoveries children make are not like mountaintops that can be charted with maps, they’re like crevices you won’t really see until you’re standing on top of them.

The trouble with the standards movement is that you’re so busy looking toward the next exam, you miss the crevices. The good news is that most good teachers find a way to deliver the skills without reducing classrooms to boot camps.

Q: So “outcomes” aren’t enough?
There are two sets of vocabulary in education. One is for the national conventions organized by business. It uses words like outcome-based, performance-based. That’s graceless jargon with very little connection to classrooms.

Most good teachers don’t talk this way. We’re not hired to make mud pies. We don’t have to relinquish our humanity. The best teachers don’t come into a school because they want to become floor managers of industry. They come because of the poetry. If we reduce teachers to automatons with test-driven curriculum, the profession will lose all of its joy and the most poetic teachers will not stay.

Q: Your new book is more personal than your previous work. Why?
It’s a memoir. I’ve been living as if I’m still 29, but I’m 64. I saw this as my last chance to spend six hours a day keeping up with children at their school, church, and home. I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to go among them again. Little Elio would see me heading to a subway stop late at night and he’d worry. “Cuidate,” be careful, he’d say, and offer to help me.

I also write about my parents who are in their 90s. I was writing about two gentle people at the end of one century and children at the beginning of a new century. How wonderful.

Resources

Interested in books by Jonathan Kozol? Click on the title or book cover to go right to Amazon.com to read more about each book and to place your order.

Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope, Spring 2000.

Amazing Grace : The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, 1995.

Savage Inequalities : Children in America's Schools, 1991.

Rachel and Her Children : Homeless Families in America, 1988.

Illiterate America, 1985.

On Being a Teacher, 1981.

Death at an Early Age : The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools, 1967.