It's worse in many ways because there are so few political leaders even questioning these inequalities. I saw how unfairly our schools are financed and governed. That's when, in a sense, this book that I just published, began. There I saw what good education can be, what wonderful conditions can exist for privileged children. I was hired a couple of years later to teach in one of the wealthiest suburban school districts outside of Boston. Put it in my pocket and I'll bring it to the school myself.” I don't know a better way to fix the root problem. When they say that to me, I look them right in the eyes and say, “Sure. We throw money at anything that has to do with human pain. They never speak of throwing money at the Pentagon.

They say, “Can you really solve this kind of problem by throwing money at it?” Conservatives love that word throwing. Louis that it would take real money to hire and keep good teachers so they would stay for a lifetime in the schools that need them most that it would take real money to buy computers. As though it's a bizarre idea that it would really take dollars to put a new roof on Morris High School in the Bronx and get the sewage out of the schools in East St. As though it's bizarre to suggest that money would be the solution to poverty. They ask, “Can you really solve this kind of problem with money? Is money really the answer?” I always think it's an amazing question.

That's the point where the question comes and the question is always the same. After I give speeches, people will come up to me and say, “Good job.” They seem to like me, but then a moment comes when they step away and I can tell something different is coming. All they need to do is visit a school with 200 IBMs a school where the roof doesn't leak a school that is surrounded by green lawns, where the architecture and atmosphere of the school entice people to feel welcome a school in which the prosperity of the school creates the relaxed atmosphere in which the teachers feel free to innovate, which they seldom do under the conditions of filth and desperation. All they need to do is go out and see schools where there are 16 children in a class with one very experienced teacher. All they need to do is to take a bus trip out to a high school in Wilmette and see what money pays for. After all, if poor black parents on the South Side of Chicago want to know what works, they really don't need a $2 million grant from Exxon to set up another network of essential schools. And we have not been willing for many, many years. The problem is that we are not willing to pay the bill to provide the things that work for the poorest children in America. The problem is not that we don't know what works.

Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol