Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid adapted from The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

Jonathan Kozol: Talking Points: Questions: Thinking out of the Box

1) How would you, given access to whatever resources you requested, balance the playing field (should I say power field?) in one school in the Bronx, optimizing teaching and learning? How long do you think it would take?

2) Noreen Connell, the director of Educational Priorities in New York said,"When minority parents ask for something better for their kids", "the assumption is that these are parents who can be discounted. These are kids who just don't count-children we don't value". How could you, given access/influence to power brokers and limitless resources, change that statement to "clearly these children count".

3) What recourse do teachers have when asked to acquiesce when their building principal or administrator forces an absurdity on them? What kind of change could we engineer, political, legal, monetary etc. to encourage teachers to expose dubious practice or to encourage compliance of educators/administrators to honor children's time in school as a "perishable piece of life itself?"