Jonathan Kozol is an educator, an author, and an activist. If you aren't an educator, you may never have heard of him. I've read some of his work;
Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools has a prominent spot on my professional shelf. You can learn more about him here, at his home page:
http://www.learntoquestion.com/seevak/groups/2002/sites/kozol/Seevak02/ineedtogoHOMEPAGE/homepage.htmJonathan Kozol is fasting to protest NCLB; he calls it
"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."That's the point. The reason I'm putting this here in GD instead of in the Ed forum. I've been posting about the damages done by NCLB here at DU since I became a member in 2002. I've watched the march of destruction on public education go forward unhampered. NCLB is up for renewal NOW. If ever you wanted a chance to influence this destructive piece of public policy,
the time is now. Here's a <snip> from Kozol:
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. And one more <snip>:
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. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-kozol/why-i-am-fasting-an-expl_b_63622.htmlHow many DUers will call, or will write, to Senator Kennedy about NCLB this week? The current draft on the table does not remove the damaging practice of high-stakes testing. It's inadequate, and it may doom us to many more years of harm, should it pass. The window of opportunity to effect change is closing rapidly.
Will you be a part of the force for change?