Why I am Fasting: An Explanation to My Friends

This morning, I am entering the 67th day of a partial fast that I began early in the summer as my personal act of protest at the vicious damage being done to inner-city children by the federal education law No Child Left Behind, a racially punitive piece of legislation that Congress will either renew, abolish, or, as thousands of teachers pray, radically revise in the weeks immediately ahead.

The poisonous essence of this law lies in the mania of obsessive testing it has forced upon our nation's schools and, in the case of underfunded, overcrowded inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic "teaching to the test" it has imposed on teachers, the best of whom are fleeing from these schools because they know that this debased curriculum would never have been tolerated in the good suburban schools that they, themselves, attended.

The justification for this law was the presumptuous and ignorant determination by the White House that our urban schools are, for the most part, staffed by mediocre drones who will suddenly become terrific teachers if we place a sword of terror just above their heads and threaten them with penalties if they do not pump their students' scores by using proto-military methods of instruction -- scripted texts and hand-held timers -- that will rescue them from doing any thinking of their own. There are some mediocre teachers in our schools (there are mediocre lawyers, mediocre senators, and mediocre presidents as well), but hopelessly dull and unimaginative teachers do not suddenly turn into classroom wizards under a regimen that transforms their classrooms into test-prep factories.

The real effect of No Child Left Behind is to drive away the tens of thousands of exciting and high-spirited, superbly educated teachers whom our urban districts struggle to attract into these schools. There are more remarkable young teachers like this coming into inner-city education than at any time I've seen in more than 40 years. The challenge isn't to recruit them; it's to keep them. But 50 percent of the glowing young idealists I have been recruiting from the nation's most respected colleges and universities are throwing up their hands and giving up their jobs within three years.

When I ask them why they've grown demoralized, they routinely tell me it's the feeling of continual anxiety, the sense of being in a kind of "state of siege," as well as the pressure to conform to teaching methods that drain every bit of joy out of the hours that their children spend with them in school.

"I didn't study all these years," a highly principled and effective first-grade teacher told me -- she had studied literature and anthropology in college while also having been immersed in education courses -- "in order to turn black babies into mindless little robots, denied the normal breadth of learning, all the arts and sciences, all the joy in reading literary classics, all the spontaneity and power to ask interesting questions, that kids are getting in the middle-class white systems."

At a moment when black and Hispanic students are more segregated than at any time since 1968 (in the typical inner-city school I visit, out of an enrollment that may range from 800 to 4,000 students, there are seldom more than five or six white children), NCLB adds yet another factor of division between children of minorities and those in the mainstream of society. In good suburban classrooms, children master the essential skills not from terror but from exhilaration, inspired in them by their teachers, in the act of learning in itself. They're also given critical capacities that they will need if they're to succeed in college and to function as discerning citizens who have the power to interrogate reality. They learn to ask the questions that will shape the nation's future, while inner-city kids are being trained to give prescripted answers and to acquiesce in their subordinate position in society.

In the wake of the calamitous Supreme Court ruling in the end of June that prohibited not only state-enforced but even voluntary programs of school integration, No Child Left Behind -- unless it is dramatically transformed -- will drive an even deeper wedge between two utterly divided sectors of American society. This, then, is the reason I've been fasting, taking only small amounts of mostly liquid foods each day, and, when I have stomach pains, other forms of nourishment at times, a stipulation that my doctor has insisted on in order to avert the risk of doing longterm damage to my heart. Twenty-nine pounds lighter than I was when I began, I've been dreaming about big delicious dinners.

Still, I feel an obligation to those many teachers who have told me, not as an accusation but respectfully, that it was one of my books that diverted them from easier, more lucrative careers and brought them into teaching in the first place. Some call me in the evenings, on the verge of tears, to tell me of the maddening frustration that they feel at being forced to teach in ways that make them hate themselves.

I don't want them to quit their jobs. I give them whatever good survival strategies I can. I tell them that the best defense is to be extremely good at what they do: Deliver the skills! Don't let your classroom grow chaotic! A teacher who can keep a reasonable sense of calm within her room, particularly in a school in which disorder has been common, renders herself almost inexpendable.

At the same time, I always recommend a healthy dose of sly irreverence and a sense of playful and ironical detachment from the criticisms of those clipboard bureaucrats who come around to check on them. (Teachers call them "the curriculum cops" or "NCLB overseers.") I urge them to develop mischievous and inventive ways to convince these gloomy-looking people that whatever they are teaching at that moment, no matter how delectably subversive it may be, is, in fact, directly geared to one of those little chunks of amputated knowledge, known as "state proficiencies," they are supposed to be "delivering" at that specific minute of the day.

But I've also felt the obligation to bring this battle to its source in Washington. I've tried very hard to convince a number of the more enlightened Democrats who serve on the Senate education panel to introduce amendments that will drastically reduce our government's reliance upon standardized exams in judgment of a child, school, or teacher, and attribute greater weight to factors that are not so simple-mindedly reducible to numbers.

Sophisticated as opposed to low-grade methods of assessment would not only tell us whether little Oscar or Shaniqua started out their essays with "a topic sentence" but would also tell us whether they wrote something with the slightest hint of authenticity and charm or simply stamped out insincere placebos. (A child gets no credit for originality or authenticity under No Child Left Behind. Sincerity gets no rewards. Endearing stylistic eccentricity, needless to say, is not rewarded either. That which can't be measured is not valued by the technocrats of uniformity who have designed this miserable piece of legislation.)

On a separate battlefront, I've also tried to win support for an amendment to the law that will take advantage of one of the loop-holes in the recent segregation ruling, an opening that Justice Kennedy has offered us by his insistence that criteria that are not race-specific may be used in order to advance diversity in public schools.

There is a provision in No Child Left Behind that permits a child in a chronically low-performing school to transfer to a more successful school. Up to now, it hasn't worked because there aren't enough successful schools in inner-city districts to which kids can transfer. The Democrats, I've argued, have the opportunity to make this option workable if they are sufficiently audacious to require states to authorize a child's right to transfer across district lines, and provide financial means to make this possible, so that children trapped in truly hopeless schools could, if their parents so desired, go to school in one of the high-spending suburbs that are often a mere 20-minute ride from their front door.

I was surprised that none of the senators with whom I spoke rejected this proposal as too controversial or politically unthinkable. More than one made clear that they enjoyed the notion of helping to "improve" a flawed provision that the White House had included in the law for reasons that most certainly were not intended to enable inner-city kids to go to beautiful suburban schools with 16 or 18 children in a room, instead of 29, or 35, or 40, as in many urban systems.

It was, however, on the testing issue that I received the most explicitly unqualified and positive response. Several of the senators made a lot of time available to think aloud about the ways in which to get rid of that sense of siege so many teachers had described and to be certain that we do not keep on driving out these talented young people from our schools.

The only member of the Democratic leadership I have been unable to get through to is the influential chairman of the education panel, Senator Ted Kennedy, who, one of his colleagues told me flatly, will ultimately "call the shots" on this decision. I've asked the senator three times if he'll talk with me. Each time, I have run into a cold stone wall. This has disappointed me, and startled me, because the senator has been a friend to me in years gone by and has asked for my ideas on education on a number of occasions in the decades since I was a youthful teacher and he was a youthful politician.

Senator Kennedy is, of course, a very busy man and has many other issues of importance he must deal with. But it's also possible, aides to other senators suggest, that he does not wish to contemplate dramatic changes in the law because he co-sponsored the initial bill in a deal with the Republicans. He is also renowned as a gifted builder of consensus in the legislative process. Lending his support to either of the two proposals I have made would almost surely guarantee a knockdown battle with conservative Republicans and, perhaps, with some of the Democratic neoliberals as well.

Still, Senator Kennedy has displayed a genuine nobility of vision in defense of elemental fair play for low-income children many times before. Is it possible that he may rise to the occasion once again? If he does, I may finally listen to the worries of my friends and decide it's time to bring this episode of fasting to an end. If not, I'll keep slogging on. It's a tiny price to pay compared to what so many of our children and their teachers have to go through every single day.

Comments

[14justice]

A draft of the ESEA/NCLB Reauthorization has provisions which will supersede collective bargaining and federally mandate "Performance Pay" based on student test scores. George Miller and Nancy Pelosi are wrong on NCLB! Contact your Congressional Representative by phone or fax and insist they vote NO on NCLB!

[Deidroni]

Mr. Kozol,

Thank you for the post and for being an inspiration to educators in America.

I work in a suburban Philadelphia elementary school and find the pressure put on children to acheive high test scores for NCLB makes them nervous and scared. It has become total overkill.

NCLB has not helped the huge amount of H.S. drop outs in Phila.. Therefore those children are being left behind. I believe the way to really help those kids is to promote the Arts. If the kids that don't relate to reading and math can identify with one of the Arts, and succeed in that area, then then they truly won't be left behind. Once the child finds success and identifies with something positive and rewarding then the reading and math will fall into place if necessary.

Music, visual arts, dance, creative writing, and drama are the answers to help that no child is left behind.

[hbooth]

I really really appreciate Jonathan Kozol's work. I don't know how he can do it without despairing and giving up! Having read his previous books and gone to inner city schools and suburban schools and seen the difference (and having come from a family of teachers) - I find it heartbreaking to read about NCLB and it's ill effects.

One of our school board members told us at a PTA meeting that the real purpose of NCLB was to mark them as failing and then privatize them (or should we say "profitize").

Also, I am disappointed to see so many posts criticizing Mr. Kozol for fasting (even partially, which might mean 1 meal a day, or avoiding something that it hurts you to give up). I don't know what his reason is for it, but I know that fasting is thought to have spiritual power. It is recommended in the Bible and Gandhi's fasting was effective both in deepening his spiritual insight and garnering public support. We need all the spiritual insight and public support we can get .

[FrankAusTx]

Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing this!

I believe Mr. Kozol is going for the spiritual effect, which looks like the only possible solution here since, like the British in India, the power structure seems deeply entrenched in the problem and does not wish to address the real solutions.

Consciousness is interesting -- implacable in one moment and completely fluid in the next.

[marleysghost]

The man is right. We make war on the poor this way. Now it is a Federal mandate by a self-described "C" student that makes it official. All this President knows how to do is make others suffer for his own stupidity. And as everyone should now know (thanks to Ron White) "You can't fix stupid."

[fasty]

Mr. Kozol -

As an educator I have read your work and it is always shocking to me how bad things are in the urban centers. I see how the situation is changing in my formerly middle-class white high school as it slowly transitions to more of an urban school in class and student demographics. The money just drips away due to inflation and energy costs and the federal government's failure to pay for the pointless NCLB program, I make less after inflation every year, and morale erodes from bigger classes and more responsibilities placed on us.

Our school is considered failing by NCLB but a success by US News and World Reports, because the advantaged kids take a lot of AP exams. Both paint an inaccurate picture of our school. We are slipping into the abyss in this country and no one cares. They just want lower taxes and cheap products at Walmart.

Please keep up the good fight.

[OneLiberalLady]

I believe that the Republicans came up with this legislation as an attack on public schools. And it is not just on inner-city schools.
I live in a university town of about 65,000 on Puget Sound; a beautiful and well-educated community. Yet some of the finest schools in our district have been labelled as deficient (I forget the exact appellation) because a portion of some sub-group or other has allegedly not made enough progress.
Which brings me to a question: how is it okay to view ethnic and racial groups separately for the purpose of NCLB but it is not okay to require integrated schools anymore (thanks to the recent Supreme Court ruling)?
I don't get it. But mostly I don't understand why any sentient person thinks that calling a school names will help the situation.
The over-reliance on testing of "basics" will result in the dumbing-down of our schools. Not a helpful thing for America as we move along in the 21st Century.

[Mariel]

I used to be a teacher in a community college. My best class--far better than college transfer classes, was Spelling and Vocabulary. In this, I included a lot of rote work, that is, pronouncing each syllable of multisyballic words, learning the roots, prefixes, and suffixes which went into forming those words--a lot of "rote". However, we also studied the history of the English language while learning these things, and the "kids" loved it. I had students who have almost failed in high school, who assumed they could not use "big words", find out to their utter delight that they could, and that they then could write them in sentences, and then could use them in research papers in my other classes.

What I did was put BACK some rote into the meandering method of teaching grammar, spelling, and composition which they had experienced.

Many of my students were black or foreign, although the majority were white.

It is very important to give students enthusiasm, but some of them do need the basics.

I found this class my most satisfying in results, and it was very popular. When I went on disability at last, the class was dropped. Few people want to teach this way. They want more excitement, perhaps. To me, seeing the kind of results I had was all the excitement I needed.

I assume this is the NCLB curriculum is NOT the same as what I was doing, although it may have rote elements.

[martialgir]

I agree with pretty much everything you said except for one thing; this isn't just an inner city school problem. There are plenty of little suburban white robots who are forced to swallow and regurgitate selected bits of educational flotsam and jetsam. With NCLB every student loses. Do not assume that all suburban children get to experience the joy of learning. I know plenty who don't and teachers who are at the end of their rope.

[ifyahasta]

It is also a small town/rural school district problem. I work in an elementary school in a town of @7,000. We're the largest district for 70 miles in any direction. Our teachers have to use materials & methods they don't believe in because that is what's mandated. They spend as much or more time on paperwork that is supposed to prove that they're doing their jobs as they do teaching. Every kid in the classroom is held to the same standard regardless of ability - and by that I mean that kids who, when I was in school would've been in special education classes but who are now in gen ed due to mainstreaming.

NCLB is working beautifully for what it was designed to do - which is dumb down the kids so that when they're voters, they'll believe what the pretty people on TV tell them and vote for the corporatist candidate of Party A or Party B.

[fetchezlavache]

I am a lo-o-o-ngtime educator. "Teaching to the test" is stifling any hint of creativity and imagination in both the teachers and the students.

[StarkRavingNakedEmperor]

To best your perceived enemies, think like a warrior. The most powerful thing you can do is to eat better than ever and become three times as strong and healty and live many, many more days to fight them anew, make yourself an all around monkey-wrenching nuisance--a thorn in their sides and a pain in their asses. It makes no sense whatsoever to punish yourself, starve your body, inducing permanent brain--one day soon becoming too depleted to think well or do anything whatsoever constructive. Living long and strong is the best revenge against your enemies!

[JD-28]

What's missing in this equation is any mention of idiot parents who treat the public school system as if it is advanced day care for their little "darlings". How will children learn if they are being raised by lazy, morons who do nothing to help teachers reinforce the importance of a good education and self-discipline? These are the same people who scream foul if a teacher has the chutzpah to scold one of their little "angels" or give them a bad mark on a test. Bad marks cause stress don'cha know. And we wouldn't want that now would we? There are good parents out there who care about their children. They realize they are raising human beings who need knowledge or risk having a tougher time in life. It is time for all parents to get more personally involved with what is going on in their child's life. Sending your children off to school expecting they will magically get a good education, complaining about the teachers if they don't, isn't working so far! Lazy, stupid, selfish parents will in fact raise lazy, stupid, selfish children. Too often those who are really leaving the children behind are the parents and all the great teachers in the world won't help one bit.

[nihilon x]

While your point is understood, I grew up in a single-parent household where my mother took absolutely NO interest in my school work.

I still excelled in all of my classes, taking advanced coursework all the way from 3rd grade through high school.

The difference between myself and many of my "black" relatives of the same generation who did not graduate and/or did not go on to college?

ENVIRONMENT.

You can have the worst parents in the world, but if you have good teachers, a quality school, and a safe learning environment you can still achieve scholastic excellence.

I speak from experience on this.

[giita]

If only NCLB judged school/student performance the same way that Bush has judged the "surge" benchmarks! Meeting 30% of a goal would be considered satisfactory; meeting 15% would be considered "partial success;" and lack of progress would be deemed "too soon to tell; send more money."

[johnmorgan]

Brilliant, Giita! I love it! Yes, we have two types of justice here. Scooter Libby's sentence was "too harsh," but black teenagers in Louisiana get 100 years in jail.

[dchavern]

And who thinks suburban schools are doing so great?

With all of the concern about optimal outcomes we seem to be looking past a simple fact: people who aren't proficient in written English and basic math will not have a place in our future economy. Period. We can dress it up all we want, but any system that produces graduates without these skills is a failure -- both for the students and for our country. Whether there is "joy for learning" or not, these skills constitute hard-wired minimum requirements for our public education system.

Unfortuntely, very few systems -- whether urban or suburban -- are meeting the demands of our current and future economy. NCLB is an attempt to get directly at these core educational needs. If you don't like it, ok -- but at least suggest some other clear path for getting ALL kids and ALL systems to produce graduates with these minimum skills.

[der Alte]

excellent article tho I doubt fasting will do it. we've spent yrs getting into this fix & it will take yrs to get out. my take on all of it is that the proliferation of little colleges evrywhere, popping up like mushrooms overnite are providing 'remedial highschool' & in the end smart kids whether they get an ed or not like so many who drop out, & start a Co. or whatever will somehow survive no matter how many roadblocks we fumbling grownups put in their way.

[dora rice]

Alter, surviving school years, and getting an education are two different ball games. You see what happens when we put a leader into the White House who survived.

[TimtheDemocrat]

It was about two years ago when a man set himself on fire in front of thousands of Chicago commuters as a protest against the US War in Iraq. He was a monk and had planned this and even had a camera that recorded the entire event.

You probably never heard of it because it was puposefully squashed by local people and never covered in the media at all.

Whereas in 1967, a single picture in LIFE magazine of a monk setting himself on fire was fairly instrumental in changing US opinion on that war, today we don't allow any such images to intrude on our American dream. So I suggest you stop your little diet, because Americans don't even bat an eye at these type of things anymore. Even millions in the street are ignored. America died because nobody cares.

[steamboat]

Tim, what you say is sad but correct. The young are more interested in hip-hop, saying nasty things about women and glorifying violence. No time to talk about some guy who sets himself on fire.

[budalla]

A suicide protester, much like a suicide bomber, is a useless and yet dangerous member of society.

Both set an example that doing something stupid, even for the "right" reasons is acceptable.

I read about the incident in Chicago, it was not "squashed" in my area. I read about it in several news venues. I shook my head in sadness that humanity had lost a person of ideals and faith.

I am a child of the 60s and early 70s and I remember the impression the pictures of that incident in Life magazine left upon me. I also remember that it really didn't change many people's impression of the war. It inflamed those who were against it already, at best. At worst, it hardened those that were for it. It was merely polarizing.

No, the turning point around that time was the realization that our fathers and brothers were dying in ever-increasing numbers and the grand purpose of the "police action", though originally politically laudable, was increasingly futile and a waste of our men and resources. The feeling of hopelessness that Vietnam veterans brought back with them began to permeate society as well.

And we mustn't forget that Walter Cronkite and the nightly news began to turn middle America against the war. Faceless death and carnage in a foreign land can be ignored if it doesn't touch you or yo but thrust in your face through the TV night after night brings the horror home.

No, one stupid death didn't do much but generate some very good pictures and 15 minutes of fame for the deceased.

To risk death or die for good cause, such as to save another's life, can be understood. To die or risk death for publicity is merely stupid.

There are much better ways a person can attempt to change things for the better and that requires that the person be alive to try.

[TimtheDemocrat]

Yes, I wish Walter Cronkite ran the news. I don't remember much from then. But I do remember body counts.

The US media could end this war if they only reported the news, honestly.

Where did you hear about it? I recall I think only Democracy Now! and Randi Rhodes covered it that I listen to. No local coverage, that is for sure. The images were also not published, but the can't be said for the thousands of commuters who witnessed it. They destroyed the video he had set up. Talking about something is one thing and seeing a photo of a person on fire is another. Yes, seems like he was trying to be the present day version of that Viet Nam monk. Can you imagine if that got on YouTube?

I remember talkign about it as a kid and someone showed me that photo in LIFE. Um I believe the talk was like .. "wow, he like was still sitting in the lotus position while on fire". Sure you can moralize about suicide, but what did Jesus do? I remember thinking "holy crap, these people would set themselves on fire, we better get out of there". I think I was maybe 7 when I saw that picture.

Was his death "stupid"? All I can say to that is that I think of that guy ever time I go by the spot where he did it. Right next to a sculpture called the 'eternal flame'. Yes, I suppose it is stupid to throw away your life, but I don't think he's going to go to hell for it.

[johnmorgan]

TimtheDemocrat, you might be right, but at least Kozol is trying to accomplish something.

[BobinNC]

Another good reason to have R's standing behind any legislator's name.