Kozol comes to Lowell
As a student at UML, in a Sociology class, Chancellor Marty Meehan read a book called Death at an Early Age, by Jonathan Kozol. It changed the way he thought about education and equality. Today, Meehan introduced Jonathan Kozol to a packed room at the Leary library. Present were faculty, students, teachers, members of the school department, and interested community members. Current Lowell Superintendent Karla Baehr was in the audience along with future superintendent Chris Augusta Scott. Dana Mohler-Faria, president of Bridgewater State College and special advisor for education to Governor Patrick, sat on the panel of respondents and told the crowd he feels a ”sense of urgency” about our children and that education is the governor’s number one priority.
Kozol is a brave and compassionate man who has spent his career saying uncomfortable things about poverty, race and class. Today’s lecture was entitled “Public Education Under Siege: The Challenges for Educators in our Nation’s Separate and Unequal Schools.” He sees the challenges that face urban teachers stemming from too little resources and too much testing, testing that is relentless because of the sword of AYP that hangs over the heads of principals and districts. He is outraged that a poverty-stricken district, whose children may never have had the advantage of 2 or 3 years of quality pre-school (the norm in wealthy and even middle-class families), will be punished and have their funding decreased when these children fail a test in the third grade. Studies have shown that early childhood education is the greatest predictor we have of student success, and many of the neediest children never get it or don’t get enough. (This is a sore point with us in Lowell, since pre-school transportation was cut in 2003 and never restored.) Thus, the pressure is on idealistic, impassioned young teachers to become “drill sargents for the state,” and the pressure is on urban districts to squeeze out creativity, enrichment, even recess, to avoid the harsh penalties of the No Child Left Behind Act. As he points out, no one is opposed to useful, diagnostic testing that can give valuable and timely feedback to educators about a child’s needs and strengths. His thoughts on NCLB: “It can’t be fixed; it needs to be rejected.”
But Kozol isn’t all gloom and doom. He complimented Lowell on being in certain ways “a wonderful exception, partly because of demographics and partly because of leadership.” He deeply reveres the profession of teaching and the mystical chemistry that can occur between teacher and child that can result in a magical learning environment (something that is totally absent from the rigid formulations of NCLB). He visited a Boston first-grade classroom over a school year in the course of writing his latest book, Letters to a Young Teacher, and his descriptions of his visits were vivid, delightful and heartwarming. For more information about this impassioned crusador for children, his writings, and his causes, you can visit Education Action!