More My Lai tastelessness, this time from Jonathan Kozol

Friday, cigarette #3
In front of Sterling Memorial Library

Speaking of people being tasteless about My Lai, Jonathan Leaf took education expert (not to be confused with an expert educator) Jonathan Kozol to town and back in the latest The Weekly Standard:

...in the ideal school, [Kozol] explains, students should not "line up elegantly beside the door, wait for [the teacher's] signal and then file to the stairs." This is behaving like "William Calley's soldiers marching to My Lai."

But Kozol has more to answer for than his bad taste. Leaf attributes "the national phenomenon of judges' compelling states to change their tax codes to increase funding for schools in poor districts" to Kozol's bestseller Savage Inequalities. I was in high school when North Carolina hopped on this particular trend, and I remember shaking my head over Howard Manning's ruling in Hoke County Board of Education v. the State of North Carolina:

The right to the equal opportunity to a sound basic education, is only to the sound basic education, not the frills and whistles. The State Constitution does not require that children be provided the courses and experiences to enable them to go to Yale or Harvard. While there is no restriction on high-level electives, modern dance, advanced computer courses and multiple foreign language courese being taught or paid for by tax dollars in the public schools, the Constitutional guarantee of a sound basic education for each child must first be met.

In other words, the state can't spend a dime on "frills and whistles" like AP classes or dance until Hoke County graduation rates reach an acceptable level.

The court later walked Manning's language back, releasing a statement implying that any resemblence his ruling may have to actual policy was purely coincidental, but they left intact the basic principle: the "fairness" of a state's education budget is defined not by how much money each county spends (per pupil spending at the time of the case was $4663.08/yr in Hoke County, $4220.46/yr in Wake County, where I went to school, which offered an abundance of "frills and whistles"), but by how academically successful their students are. This links funding to measures (i.e. graduation rates) with which increased funding has no correlation.

Leaf points out this fallacy in relation to Kozol:

Savage Inequalities opens with a 37-page account of the horrors of a school in the almost all-black city of East St. Louis, Illinois. [...] As a contrast with this school, Kozol reports on a lovely white school in a nearby suburb. But, on the last page of the opening chapter, he slips in an immensely interesting fact: School spending in East St. Louis is above the average in the state! The school's rock-bottom achievements are not the result of rock-bottom spending. How then can increased funding be the solution if it isn't the cause of the supposed problem?

I only wish Leaf's article had spent less time pointing out Kozol's influence on teachers and academics (which is merely ridiculous) and more time focusing on his impact on policy (which is actually dangerous). This is not to say that he should have taken Kozol more seriously; he makes clear that this is something one must not do. But Kozol getting the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award is a joke, not a horror story, and there are plenty of education policy horror stories that matter more than what gets on teacher prep class syllabi.