Jonathan Kozol

In the passion of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, speaker Jonathan Kozol gave up the prospect of a promising and secure career within the academic world, moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston, and became a fourth grade teacher.

He has since devoted nearly half-a-century to the increasingly complex and urgent issues facing public education and to the challenge of providing equal opportunity within our public schools to every child, of whatever racial origin or economic level. He is, at the present time, the most widely read and highly honored education writer in America.

Death at an Early Age, a description of his first year as a teacher, was published in 1967 and received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Now regarded as a classic by educators, it has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe.

Among the other major works that he has written since are Rachel and Her Children, a study of homeless mothers and their children, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for 1989 and the Conscience in Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and Savage Inequalities, which won the New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

His 1995 bestseller, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, described his visits to the South Bronx of New York, the poorest congressional district of America. Featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show and praised by scholars such as Robert Coles and Henry Louis Gates, and children's advocates and theologians all over the nation, Amazing Grace received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Noble Laureate Toni Morrison wrote that Amazing Grace was “good in the old-fashioned sense: beautiful and morally worthy.” Elie Wiesel said, “Jonathan’s struggle is noble. What he says must be heard. His outcry must shake our nation out of its guilty indifference.”

Ten years later, in The Shame of the Nation, Kozol returned to the battle with his strongest, most disturbing work to date: a powerful exposé of conditions he had found in visiting and revisiting nearly 60 public schools in 30 different districts in 11 states. Virtually everywhere, he found that inner-city children were more isolated racially than at any time since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. “They live an apartheid existence and attend apartheid schools. Few of them know white children any longer.” The proportion of black children who are now attending integrated public schools, he noted, is at a lower level than in any year since 1968.

The Shame of the Nation, which appeared on The New York Times bestseller list the week that it was published, has since joined Amazing Grace, Savage Inequalities, and Death at an Early Age as required reading at most universities.

In his most recent work, Letters to a Young Teacher, Kozol draws upon four decades of experience to guide the newest generation of our nation's teachers into the ethically complicated challenges but, also, “the sheer joy and passionate rewards” of what he calls “a beautiful profession.”

In a series of affectionate letters to Francesca, a first grade teacher at an inner-city school in Boston, Kozol describes the tender chemistry of love and trust that rapidly evolve between a gifted teacher and her students, while he also offers practical solutions to the day-to-day dilemmas that even the most talented young teachers must inevitably face.

“What a wonderful book!” remarked Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond. “I could not put it down!” The book is now adopted as an optimistic and enticing introduction to the field of teaching by hundreds of our schools of education.

When he is not with teachers in their classrooms, or at universities and colleges speaking to our future teachers, Kozol is likely to be found in Washington, where he devotes considerable time to what he calls “my lifelong efforts at remediation” of the members of the US House and Senate. He has spent much of the past two years attempting to convince his friends within the Senate leadership, as well as advisers to President Barack Obama, to radically reduce the punitive aspects of No Child Left Behind while increasing the incentives and rewards that can encourage urban districts.

Kozol received a summa cum laude degree in English literature from Harvard in 1958, after which he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University. He has been called by The Chicago Sun-Times “today's most eloquent spokesman for America's disenfranchised.” But he believes that teachers and their students speak most eloquently for themselves; and in his books, so full of the vitality of youth, we hear their testimony.