Kozol, Jonathan 1936–

views updated

Kozol, Jonathan 1936–

PERSONAL:

Born September 5, 1936, in Boston, MA; son of Harry (a psychiatrist) and Ruth (a psychiatric social worker) Kozol; married briefly during the 1970s. Education: Harvard University, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1958; graduate study, Magdalen College, Oxford University, 1958-59. Politics: Independent. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Byfield, MA. Agent—The Lavin Agency, 222 3rd St., Ste. 1130, Cambridge, MA 02142.

CAREER:

Elementary school teacher in Boston, MA, 1964-65, and in Newton, MA, 1966-68; Storefront Learning Center (alternative school), Boston, educational director and teacher of secondary level English, 1968-71; Center for Intercultural Documentation Institute, Cuernavaca, Mexico, instructor in alternatives in education, 1969, 1970, and 1974; South Boston High School, Boston, remedial writing and reading instructor, 1979; former director of National Literacy Coalition, Boston. Visiting instructor, Yale University, 1969, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1978-79, and Trinity College, Hartford, CT, 1980; visiting lecturer in literature and education at colleges and universities, including Antioch University, Vassar College, University of Wisconsin, University of Minnesota, Brown University, Boston University, Columbia University, Harvard University, and Princeton University, 1971-2001. Trustee, New School for Children, Roxbury, MA. Consultant to U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, 1965 and 1966, Pima County Board of Education, Tucson, AZ, 1974, Chicago Board of Education, 1975, Maryland State Penitentiary, Baltimore, MD, 1979, Connecticut Board of Education, Hartford, 1980, Rhode Island Board of Education, Providence, 1980, Cleveland Foundation, 1980—, Cleveland Public Library, 1980—, Edmonton Public Schools, Vancouver School Board, Syracuse University, University of Massachusetts, and others.

MEMBER:

PEN, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Association of American Rhodes Scholars, National Coalition for the Homeless, National Coalition of Education Activists.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Rhodes Scholar, 1958-59; Olympia Award, 1962; Sexton fellowship in creative writing, Harper & Row, 1962; National Book Award, 1968, for Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools; Guggenheim fellow, 1970 and 1984; Field Foundation fellow, 1972; Ford Foundation fellow, 1974; Rockefeller fellow, 1978 and 1983; Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, 1988; Conscience in Media Award, American Society of Journalists and Authors, 1988; Christopher Award, 1988, for Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America; New England Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, both 1992, both for Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools; Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, for Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation; Christopher Award, for Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1967, revised edition, New American Library (New York, NY), 1985.

Free Schools, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1972, revised edition published as Alternative Schools: A Guide for Educators and Parents, Continuum (New York, NY), 1982.

The Night Is Dark and I Am far from Home, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1975, revised edition, Touchstone (New York, NY), 1990.

Children of the Revolution, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1978.

Prisoners of Silence: Breaking the Bonds of Adult Illiteracy in the United States, Continuum (New York, NY), 1979.

On Being a Teacher, Continuum (New York, NY), 1981.

Illiterate America, Anchor/Doubleday (New York, NY), 1985.

Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 1988, reprinted, Three Rivers Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 1991.

Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 1995.

Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 2000.

(With Deborah Heier) Will Standards Save Public Education?, Beacon (Boston, MA), 2000.

The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 2005.

Letters to a Young Teacher, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to works by others; contributor of essays to periodicals, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Atlantic, Harvard Educational Review, Psychology Today, Saturday Review of Literature, Time, English Record, Nation, Newsweek, New Yorker, Harper's, Washington Post, USA Today, Saturday Evening Post, and Look; contributor of fiction to Prairie Schooner and Esquire. Book critic, Life, New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe.

ADAPTATIONS:

Works adapted for audio include The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (nine CDs), read by Robertson Dean, Books on Tape, 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jonathan Kozol is a well-known activist and writer who has for more than four decades focused his writings and efforts on ending illiteracy, improving the economic conditions of the poverty-stricken, and pricking the consciences of affluent Americans. Since his early account of teaching at a public school in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools, many of his writings have pertained to his career as a public school advocate and educator and his experience as an activist on education issues. Kozol was fired from his job with the Boston public school system for reading the poetry of Langston Hughes to his fourth grade class, which was considered "curriculum deviation." It was this event that launched Kozol's ongoing crusade for equal education opportunity for all children, with particular emphasis on those students in poor districts who are being deprived of their share of resources and opportunities.

In Free Schools, he recounts his experiences in setting up a free school in Boston. Illiterate America, a seminal work in Kozol's exploration of illiteracy, draws on the author's background as a grassroots organizer to outline his proposal for dealing with the problem of illiteracy in the United States. In Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America, Kozol looks closely at homeless families living in a shelter in New York City, but in 1991 he returned to the subject of education in Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, pointing out the gross inequalities in school quality from community to community. With Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation and Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope, Kozol puts a human face on the conditions experienced by residents of Mott Haven, one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City.

Speaking to Paul Galloway of the Chicago Tribune about his interest in education, Kozol recounted his privileged childhood—attending a prep school, Harvard, and later Oxford (very briefly) as a Rhodes Scholar, and then living in poor neighborhoods in Paris while he wrote a novel. He returned to the United States in 1963, somewhat confused about his next step, but planning to get a doctorate and teach English in a university. By chance, in 1964, he learned of a need for tutors in a summer program in Roxbury, and he volunteered. As Galloway reported: "He found that he loved teaching; he loved being with children. In September [1964] he became a teacher in the Boston school system."

Death at an Early Age, Kozol's first book and winner of the National Book Award in 1968, is in large part a product of its times. Written several years before the integration of Boston public schools, much of the book relates to concerns that arose out of the desegregation debate that was taking shape while Kozol taught, as well as to civil rights conflicts that transpired in the South during the mid-1960s. The book documents the repressive teaching methods Kozol's colleagues used, techniques he believed were designed to reinforce a system that would keep the children separate and unequal.

Some reviewers thought the work open to criticism, however. As Charles R. Moyer stated in Carleton Miscellany, the author's "rather romantic primitivism blinds Mr. Kozol to his own brand of condescension which prevents him from ever seeing the black children in any role other than that of innocent victims." Kozol's descriptions of "white teachers and agents of the system (with the possible exception of himself) are stereotyped and totally negative," Elizabeth M. Eddy wrote in Harvard Educational Review. "In contrast, there is no unsympathetic sketch of a Negro child or adult."

Others, however, believed Death at an Early Age provided a real public service. Kozol's book "eloquently describes the consequences of this system for both child and teacher, and Kozol himself is a dramatic example of the way in which the teacher is often discouraged from initiating creative learning activities in the classroom," Eddy reported, noting that "in addition, the book presents insightful material relevant to the pathological adaptations made by many teachers who remain in the slum school rather than moving elsewhere."

Free Schools provides parents and teachers who become dissatisfied with public schools with information on how to create and sustain an independent school for alternative urban education. Kozol writes not only about how to raise funds for a free school, but also how to become partially self-supporting. In addition, he includes information on how to find a building and handle the building code harassment he believes is often selectively reserved for such institutions. Finally, Kozol explores the various options alternative schools have in deciding how to establish a governing structure.

Richard Poirier related in the New York Times Book Review that "the very form of the book—a kind of manual with advice on how to find a building, how to raise the money, recruit a faculty, set up a curriculum, with lists of contacts and leads—proves that difficulties can indeed be the seed of practical achievement rather than frustration, that anger can be transformed into energy." Jeffrey Lant in Southwest Review found that Free Schools is a "potpourri of idiosyncratic views, a book in which Kozol unburdened himself of much of the built-up tension and anxiety which had come as a result of the conflicting pressures involved in establishing his school." "The book convincingly suggests that a school only becomes ‘free’ when it creates around it a community of conscience about [immediate] and other injustices and the will to struggle against them," according to Poirier.

Washington Post Book World contributor Neil Postman believed Illiterate America to be Kozol's "best book since Death at an Early Age." Kozol first investigated the problem of illiteracy in his report on the results of the 1961 Cuban literacy campaign, Children of the Revolution, which he followed with Prisoners of Silence: Breaking the Bonds of Adult Illiteracy in the United States. Postman indicated that "whereas his more recent work has been burdened by an excess of moral indignation, here Kozol allows the outrages of illiteracy to speak for themselves. He guides us through the ‘hard facts’ of the problem with the discipline and sureness of one who has spent seven years studying the figures."

It is in the government's interest to address the problem of illiteracy, Kozol believes, since illiterates are not only excluded from a multiplicity of benefits, both small and large, which are taken for granted by most Americans, but may also be unproductive and responsible for a large number of industrial accidents. "The figures Kozol offers from official sources are staggering," according to Peter S. Prescott in Newsweek. As Kozol states, one third of all Americans are completely or partially illiterate.

Kozol praised several existing literacy programs by booksellers, libraries, and other groups as a good beginning, but he criticized others. Too many current literacy efforts are uninspired and unproductive, Kozol contends, particularly in their selection of curriculum material and methods of recruitment, and many are simply inconveniently located. He also finds fault with some programs solely on philosophical grounds; he objected especially to the U.S. Army's program and to those of other groups that help the student reach short-term reading goals within the context of gaining high-tech employment skills but do not stress the humanities, political awareness, and the importance of critical thinking. Although Kozol regards the ability to read as a hard survival skill, needed by citizens to perform a myriad of functions in his everyday existence, "we need above all else," he writes in Illiterate America, "to do away with the idea of literacy as training for domestication, contrived to fill existent or imagined lower level job slots and consumer roles, and search instead for instruments of moral leverage strong enough to scrutinize those roles and to examine the political determinants of subjugation: examine, study, stand back, and reflect upon their purpose and, by virtue of reflection and examination, first to denounce and finally to transform."

Reviewers were not without criticism of Illiterate America. The tone of Kozol's book is angry, according to a New York Times critic, but the reviewer remarked that "the kernel of [the author's] message is worth rescuing from the tide of his vehemence." Furthermore, maintained Glen Macnow in the Detroit Free Press, "in an age of self-serving conservatism," Kozol "is fighting for the ignored and forgotten." New York Times Book Review contributor Joseph S. Murphy concluded that "a polemic such as Mr. Kozol's serves a function. His enthusiasm renews our energies for the struggle before us, and gives welcome support to those committed to the notion that universal literacy and education are necessary for living a richer, better informed life."

"It is good to have Jonathan Kozol back again with a book that must be read," Postman commented. "For Kozol is what Americans mean when we talk of our ‘best and brightest.’" In the opinion of Mother Jones reviewer Barbara Ehrenreich, "to read Illiterate America is both to know what literacy is for and to understand why it can never be merely ‘functional.’ If it is a sin to read with pleasure about other people's illiteracy, then … the only cure, I am afraid, is to act on [the author's] proposal, and spread the power of the word."

Shortly before Christmas of 1985, Kozol spent an evening at the Hotel Martinique in New York, which was serving four hundred of the city's homeless families, including fourteen hundred children, as a temporary shelter. There he began to talk with some of the residents, and he returned many times in the course of writing Rachel and Her Children. William J. Drummond, writing in Tribune Books, declared that "Kozol's major achievement in Rachel and Her Children is to dispel the media-fashioned stereotype of the homeless and force the reader to look into their faces and listen to their voices." Teresa Funiciello in the Nation saw Kozol's method in another light. Though she believed Kozol "effectively uses the homeless to describe their own plight," she asserted that "he falls into the same trap that he warns others against: He can't quite hear what they are saying. He refuses to rely on them for prescriptive measures, instead choosing to derive political definitions primarily from the professional ‘advocates.’" New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt complained that although Kozol "successfully humanizes his subject" and "even rises to an occasional pitch of eloquence," "there is something distinctly irritating and occasionally even infuriating about the tone of voice in which Mr. Kozol presumes to lecture us."

Kozol returned to the classroom in Savage Inequalities. "This is a painful book to read, alternately suffusing the reader with rage and sorrow," remarked Stan Persky in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Andrew Hacker described it in the New York Times Book Review as "an impassioned book, laced with anger and indignation, about how our public education system scorns so many of our children." In Savage Inequalities, Kozol examined several inner-city schools, beginning in East St. Louis, Illinois, and found the buildings dirty, deteriorating, crowded by the large numbers of students forced to use them, and physically unsafe. These schools also suffered from a scarcity of books, equipment, and teachers. They ran on much smaller budgets than those of such affluent schools as New Trier High in Winnetka, Illinois, and Rye, outside of New York City, which he presents, among others, in contrast to the inner-city schools. It is no surprise that a further difference between the two kinds of schools is student population: in most of the inner-city schools, students are predominantly poor and black or Hispanic, while in the suburban institutions the student body is composed largely of white or Asian children from high-income families.

Publishers Weekly devoted its September 27, 1991, cover to an open letter to President George H.W. Bush urging him to read Savage Inequalities. Describing the book as "startling and disturbing," the editors noted that it tells "the story of two nations that are separate and unequal in their educational facilities" largely due to the "inequitable distribution of public funds." "The issue is not likely to disappear," Ruth Sidel stated in the Nation, but she believed that "the publication of Savage Inequalities will insure that the injustice and incredible shortsightedness of American educational policy are vividly and compassionately brought to the forefront of the public's consciousness and the agenda of policymakers." While acknowledging Kozol's argument that "better-off Americans … ‘do not want poor children to be harmed; they simply want the best for their own children,’" Time contributor Emily Mitchell noted that "anyone who has seen the shameful disparities between public schools in rich and poor areas, or who has read Kozol's vivid account, will find it difficult to deny that the differences in funding make a mockery of the nation's ideal."

During the 1990s, curiosity led Kozol down a new path, one both challenging and rewarding, that led to his writing Amazing Grace. "I hadn't planned to write this book," Kozol recalled to Lonnie Harp of EducationWeek. "I simply got on the train one day in midtown Manhattan because I'd been told of an Episcopal church where children were given a safe sanctuary, and I wanted to see it. In a matter of days, I became friends with people and just started writing what I was feeling and what they were saying." Many visits and mountains of yellow legal pads later, Kozol published Amazing Grace, in which he again confronts the troubling questions of poverty and race in America.

Amazing Grace is Kozol's account of time spent in Mott Haven, a desperately poor neighborhood in the South Bronx of New York City. Perhaps the poorest urban neighborhood in all of the United States, Mott Haven's list of woes includes high rates of heroin users, AIDS sufferers, homicides, and unemployment. The city's residents, mostly black and Hispanic, are forced to contend with nightmarish housing conditions, substandard city services, and a deficient educational system. As in his previous books, Kozol reported these conditions with a mixture of rage and resignation, questioning how a city—and a nation—of such vast resources can allow such conditions to exist. After relating anecdote after anecdote of children living in miserable circumstances and adults with little hope of improving their lives, Kozol admitted "that the sense of human ruin on a vast scale becomes unmistakable," to quote Nation reviewer Kai Erikson.

Critics commended Kozol's achievement in making visible the sad characteristics of life in Mott Haven. Writing in the Washington Post Book World, Marie Arana-Ward called Kozol's text "a powerful book that lays bare what is surely the ugliest truth about us: that there are pockets of hell in our inner cities, and that even as an entire sector of America is condemned to burn in them, we insist on looking the other way." Erikson recommended it for "its calm power, its sensitivity and its almost painful clarity." "Kozol's job is to sound alarms and to put human faces in terrains that we know primarily from a numbing array of numbers and facts. This he does beautifully," Erikson added.

Some reviewers, while conceding the power of Kozol's account, stated that the author seems to have become less hopeful about the possibility of change than in his previous books. "Like most of Mr. Kozol's writing, Amazing Grace is passionate and poignant. But in places it also seems jaded and languid, as if Mr. Kozol were becoming tired of shouting, of exposing this country's often cold treatment of its downtrodden," remarked Alex Kotlowitz in the New York Times Book Review. Kozol has long been frustrated by the stubbornness of social problems, or rather society's lack of true commitment to solving them. "I write because I want to make something different in the world," Kozol told Harp. About Amazing Grace, he continued, "This time, I want to raise the stakes and say the question here is not whether we know what the problem is or whether we have the strategy to deal with it or the money to deal with it. Those aren't really the questions. The question is whether we want to be one society or two. Until that is dealt with, nothing else will be solved, and all the rest—the reports and charity and pilot programs—will be pretense." In Harp's view, "This time around, Jonathan Kozol is shooting straight for the soul."

Another critic faulted Kozol for perceived errors of omission. In Commentary, Sol Stern complained that some of Kozol's statistics (such as the murder rate) are outdated and that he ignored the success of students at Catholic elementary schools in the neighborhood or the construction of low-income housing in the area by a private group. Nevertheless, as Erikson pointed out: "Among the many virtues of Jonathan Kozol's strong and often beautiful book is that we cannot forget for even an instant that the poor are of our kind and live but a moment away." In that context, concluded Arana-Ward, "[Kozol's] book is as good as a blessing."

In Ordinary Resurrections Kozol presents New York City's South Bronx through a different perspective, a less strident and more hopeful outlook for the area's children. Exposing complex beliefs and a range of emotions, Ordinary Resurrections presents the life and leadership seen in their peer groups, homes, schools, and religious institutions. Readers are also shown how in following some of these children for more than six years Kozol has been affected by what his subjects have given him. Daniel LeDuc, in a review for the Philadelphia Inquirer, noted that Ordinary Resurrections evinces "less anger—but no less passion" and is "a sobering reminder that not everyone is breathlessly tracking the stock market." "I wanted this book to be a very gentle book," Kozol told Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe. "I got sick of angry polemic…. So I tried to subdue my voice. I thought it would be unworthy of the children's sweetness if I wrote in a strident tone."

The book is "a moving tribute," applauded a writer for Christian Science Monitor, who added that Kozol is sure of one thing, and that "is the value of what the company of children has brought to him." Kozol, who was briefly married in the 1970s, has no children of his own. "This hasn't been any kind of a sacrifice," he once said. "I was happiest in my life when I was about eight years old. I guess it's not surprising that I enjoy being with [children that age]. There's something about them that makes you feel their divinity." Fred Rogers of "Mister Rogers" fame, and a longtime friend of Kozol, told Megan Rosenfeld of the Washington Post: "Jonathan is very real with the children. He allows them to know how important they are to him—because they are. They are an extended family for him…. This is not some kind of scientific research."

While acknowledging the problems these children face and will likely face later in life, Kozol revealed to CA: "The spiritual strengths of the children and the dedication of their teachers in the public schools were decisive factors here [in the book's overall hopeful tone]. The schools are still unequal, and the medical and social inequalities these children face are still grotesque and shameful. But I've focused here on younger kids before they have been damaged by the cruelties of life. Their innocence and energy renewed my sense of hope."

In The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Kozol continues his study of the inequalities of the public school system and, in fact, writes that problems are escalating. Minority students are graduating in few numbers from schools that herd them through the system without offering them challenging and interesting courses that might keep them in classes. In preparation for writing this book, Kozol visited sixty schools in thirty districts in eleven states over five years. He notes that in predominantly white schools, affluent parents often subsidize special programs, thereby giving their children advantages not available to children in poor, crumbling schools that are also shortchanged when books and resources are distributed, and which are often able to attract only young, inexperienced teachers whose primary duty becomes controlling student behavior.

Kozol's primary authority for this book is the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Gary Orfield, "who has been as persistent in documenting the scale of segregation, and attacking its presumed educational effects, as Kozol has been in describing it," wrote Nathan Glazer in the New York Times Book Review. "According to Orfield and his colleagues, writing in 2004, and quoted by Kozol, ‘American public schools are now twelve years into the process of continuous resegregation…. During the 1990's, the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased … to a level lower than in any year since 1968.’"

Linda Perlstein reviewed the book in the Columbia Journalism Review. Perlstein concluded: "For our neediest schools and students, The Shame of the Nation urges national action, including major funding increases and access to preschool. It's hard to imagine anyone better qualified than Kozol to press the case. Still, that Kozol has to tell the story of educational segregation and resegregation again and again, that he so often seems alone in doing so, and that so little progress is made—this is truly a shame of our nation."

Booklist contributor Vanessa Bush described Letters to a Young Teacher as being "a beautiful book that offers an intimate look at the challenges and joys of teaching." Kozol began a correspondence with a first-year teacher named Francesca who taught at an inner-city Boston school. In these letters, he recalls his early years as a teacher and his documentation of how the system does or does not work, opinions he formed through visits to classes and close relationships with educators and administrators. While Kozol celebrates what he calls the "beautiful profession," he criticizes vouchers and projects like the Gates Foundation initiative to create small schools as further dividing children by race. He advises young teachers about how they should handle those students who are determined not to like or learn from them and their relationships with parents and administrators. A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote: "Each letter to Francesca is studded with insights. Today's obsession with tests and ‘proficiency’ comes in for some of Kozol's saltiest castigations, as do the teachers who bow before them." Library Journal reviewer Jean Caspers felt that this volume is "a fine update of his ideas and insights."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 17, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, August, 2005, Vanessa Bush, review of The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, p. 1948; September 1, 2007, Vanessa Bush, review of Letters to a Young Teacher, p. 29.

Boston Globe, May 17, 2000, Mark Feeney, "The Gentlest Angry Man," interview, pp. C1, C6.

Carleton Miscellany, winter, 1969, Charles R. Moyer, review of Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools.

Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1988, Paul Galloway, interview.

Christian Science Monitor, July 5, 2000, review of Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope.

Columbia Journalism Review, September-October, 2005, Linda Perlstein, review of The Shame of the Nation, p. 67.

Commentary, March, 1996, Sol Stern, review of Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, pp. 70-72.

Curriculum Administrator, September, 2000, Gary Stager, "Jonathan Kozol Speaks Out," interview, p. 33.

Detroit Free Press, March 31, 1985, Glen Macnow, review of Illiterate America.

District Administration, January, 2006, Gary Stager, "Jonathan Kozol Takes on the World," interview, p. 60, review of The Shame of the Nation, p. 70.

Education, spring, 2006, Marcus A. Winters, "Savage Exaggerations: Worshiping the Cosmology of Jonathan Kozol," p. 71.

Education Week, October 11, 1995, Lonnie Harp, "Soul Searching," interview, pp. 25-31.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), November 23, 1991, Stan Persky, review of Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, p. C8.

Harvard Educational Review, spring, 1968, Elizabeth M. Eddy, review of Death at an Early Age.

Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, 2006 (annual), Aimee Wilczynski, review of The Shame of the Nation, p. 95.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2005, review of The Shame of the Nation, p. 830; June 15, 2007, review of Letters to a Young Teacher.

Library Journal, October 15, 2005, Ari Sigal, review of The Shame of the Nation, p. 64; August 1, 2007, Jean Caspers, review of Letters to a Young Teacher, p. 98.

Midwest Quarterly, spring, 1998, Adonna Zordel Helmig, review of Amazing Grace, pp. 360-361.

Mother Jones, April, 1985, Barbara Ehrenreich, review of Illiterate America, p. 54.

Nation, April 2, 1988, Teresa Funiciello, review of Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America, pp. 465-474; November 18, 1991, Ruth Sidel, review of Savage Inequalities, pp. 620-622; November 20, 1995, Kai Erikson, review of Amazing Grace, pp. 616-619, 622.

New Republic, June 17, 1996, Sara Mosle, review of Amazing Grace, p. 27-29.

Newsweek, March 11, 1985, Peter S. Prescott, review of Illiterate America, p. 73.

New York Times, March 21, 1985, review of Illiterate America, p. 21; January 28, 1988, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Rachel and Her Children, p. 19.

New York Times Book Review, March 5, 1972, Richard Poirier, review of Free Schools, p. 5; April 14, 1985, Joseph S. Murphy, review of Illiterate America, p. 36; October 6, 1991, Andrew Hacker, review of Savage Inequalities, p. 7; October 15, 1995, Alex Kotlowitz, review of Amazing Grace, p. 26; September 25, 2005, Nathan Glazer, review of The Shame of the Nation, p. 12.

Philadelphia Inquirer, May 14, 2000, Daniel LeDuc, review of Ordinary Resurrections.

Plough, January, 1996, Christopher Zimmerman, "A Conversation with Jonathan Kozol," pp. 1-7.

Publishers Weekly, September 27, 1991, special issue devoted to Savage Inequalities; June 4, 2007, review of Letters to a Young Teacher, p. 41.

Reading Today, April-May, 2006, "‘Intelligent Subversion’: An Interview with Author and Activist Jonathan Kozol," p. 10.

School Administrator, November, 2000, Paul Houston, "A Conversation with Kozol," p. 16.

Southwest Review, winter, 1977, Jeffrey Lant, review of Free Schools.

Theology Today, April, 1996, Robert Coles, review of Amazing Grace.

Tikkun, November-December, 1995, Ruth Sidel, review of Amazing Grace, pp. 76-77.

Time, October 14, 1991, Emily Mitchell, review of Savage Inequalities, pp. 60-61.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), January 24, 1988, William J. Drummond, review of Rachel and Her Children, pp. 1, 9.

U.S. Catholic, October, 2000, "Still Separate and Unequal," interview, p. 18.

Washington Post, June 1, 2000, Megan Rosenfeld, review of Ordinary Resurrections, pp. C1-C2.

Washington Post Book World, March 31, 1985, Neil Postman, review of Illiterate America, p. 5; October 22, 1995, Marie Arana-Ward, review of Amazing Grace, p. 1.