I think there may have been some progress if Ann Richards had survived as governor, but her defeat ended any hope of serious reform. In Texas for example, which was one of the areas I looked at most closely, there’s been virtually no improvement. He was interviewed by Barbara Miner of Rethinking Schools.įour years ago you wrote Savage Inequalities, which focused national attention on the problem of unequal funding of schools. This kind of kinship leads us to grander validity and deeper answers-not merely in our findings related to urban education but in our work as human beings.' - Vajra M.The following is condensed from an interview with Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities, Death at an Early Age and other books on children. Reauthoring Savage Inequalities is what research becomes when you don't merely study the community but serves its people.

This edited volume draws us away from the narrow gaze of white interlocutors and exposes the fragility of scholarship saturated with whiteness and Eurocentricity. But what happens when insiders shape our understanding of education, oppression, and liberation? A fuller, richer, more complicated rendering begins to emerge. It depicts hopelessness and victimization. In Savage Inequalities, Kozol exposes a particular deficit-driven narrative that plagues urban education. It is both a response to Kozol's scholarship and a call to do research differently.

' Reauthoring Savage Inequalities is groundbreaking, timely, and exquisite. They identify the sources of support that enable students, staff, parents, and community members to succeed and thrive despite the purposeful divestment in communities of color across this nation's cities. In nineteen essays, as well as commentaries, a foreword, and an afterword, contributors engage readers in critical dialogue about the importance of community cultural wealth. Yet, in foregrounding lived experiences of educating and being educated in schools and communities that were systemically isolated and disenfranchised then and continue to be thirty years later, Reauthoring Savage Inequalities brings nuance to depictions of teaching and learning in urban areas. The counternarratives in this volume grapple with the inequalities highlighted by Kozol. So often, discussions of urban schooling are filled with stories of what Jonathan Kozol famously referred to as 'savage inequalities' in his 1991 book of the same title-with tales of deficiency and despair. Using a community cultural wealth lens, contributors center the strategies, actions, and ways of knowing communities of color use to resist systemic oppression. Reauthoring Savage Inequalities brings together scholars, educators, practitioners, and students to counter dominant narratives of urban educational environments.

Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol