Do The Poor Deserve Bad Schools?

By EMILY MITCHELL

Before starting their morning lessons, children in public schools across the U.S. recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The familiar words echo in immaculate suburban buildings with bright, airy classrooms and labs where children study art and languages, learn on the latest computers and play sports in well- equipped gyms. They also ring out in overcrowded, eroding, inner-city schools where sewage backs up into bathroom plumbing and where students share used textbooks and practice typing on handmade, fake keyboards. Whatever the setting, the pledge ends the same: "with liberty and justice for all."

The notion of equal opportunity is central to the American ideal. For that goal to have any meaning, it must be rooted in an education system that gives every child a chance to succeed. But for decades, a gulf has been widening between the quality of public schooling for children of privilege and that for those born in poverty. By relying on local property taxes as a crucial source of funds, the U.S. has created a caste system of public education that is increasingly separate and unequal.

As these disparities have become too glaring and shameful to ignore, a reform movement has grown that seeks to play Robin Hood by taking funds from richer districts to help pay for schools in poorer ones. Since the 1970s, 10 states have decided -- or been forced by courts -- to overhaul their methods of funding some of their school districts. In the process, tempers are flaring in a manner reminiscent of the disagreements that once raged over school busing. "It is a tug-of-war between equity and excellence," says Tony Rollins, executive director of the Colorado Education Association, a state teachers' union that has been active in the funding wars.

The forces of equity have now been joined by a powerful voice: that of education gadfly Jonathan Kozol, author of a galvanizing new book, Savage Inequalities (Crown; $20). After two years of research, Kozol has written a searing expose of the extremes of wealth and poverty in America's school system and the blighting effect on poor children, especially those in cities. In public schooling, he argues, social policy during the Reagan-Bush era "has been turned back almost 100 years."

From San Antonio to New York City's South Bronx, Kozol observes, inner-city schools are bleak fortresses with rotting classrooms and few amenities to inspire or motivate the young. A history teacher at East St. Louis' Martin Luther King Jr. High School, he notes, has 110 students in four classes, and only 26 books. Every year, says a teacher in a nearby school, "there's one more toilet that doesn't flush, one more drinking fountain that doesn't work, one more classroom without texts."

In painful detail, Kozol describes such inner-city schools as Morris High in the South Bronx, where water cascades down the stairways when it rains, and Chicago's Du Sable High, where the chemistry teacher uses a popcorn popper as a Bunsen burner. Kozol juxtaposes these images with descriptions of the luxurious facilities in nearby wealthy suburbs like Winnetka, north of Chicago. Its New Trier High has, among other things, seven gyms, rooms for fencing, wrestling and dance instruction, and an Olympic-size pool.

The trade journal Publishers Weekly took the unprecedented step of running an open letter to President Bush on its Sept. 27 cover urging him to read Savage Inequalities. "It is," reads the letter, "the story of how, in our public schools, we are creating a country profoundly different from the one our founders envisaged."

For Kozol and many activist reformers, the chief villain of the education tragedy is "local control," America's decentralized system of school administration and its heavy reliance on property taxation. Everything from pencils to teachers' salaries is paid for through a patchwork process that varies from state to state. But in most cases, about 6% of the money in any district comes from Washington, 47% from the state government and 47% from locally generated property taxes. Kozol believes the best way to improve schools -- all schools -- would be to do away completely with the property tax as a source of revenue. In its place he suggests a progressive income tax to raise money that would then be distributed fairly among districts.

There is no denying the key role that property levies have played in creating the vast educational gap between rich and poor. School trustees in the affluent Texas district of Glen Rose, for example, annually dole out $9,326 per pupil -- three times as much as the per-student allocation in the Rio Grande Valley's bleak Roma district. For reformers, the chief ally has been state courts, which have ruled in many cases -- Kentucky, Texas, New Jersey and Montana, for example -- that inequalities are unconstitutional. In Tennessee, 77 school districts asked a state court to take the same approach, and won. A similar suit has been launched by 108 of Michigan's 500 school districts.

The reform movement is already producing some results. In 1989 Kentucky's supreme court ruled that the state's school-finance system was unconstitutional; the richest schools were allocated as much as $4,200 a year for each pupil, while poorer ones received only $1,700 per student. Under a plan that is in its second year, virtually every school district now has at least $3,200 to spend per student; over the years, the gap between rich and poor districts will be further narrowed. Children from low-income families now have new preschool programs, and there is a wide range of Saturday and after- school projects for students with special needs.

But in other parts of the country the fight over redistributing privilege remains bitter. Texas' state supreme court ruled in 1989 that gross educational inequality could no longer be condoned. Since then Texas lawmakers have come up with two plans that the judiciary found unsatisfactory. Governor Ann Richards signed a compromise law last year that shifted millions of dollars in property-tax revenue to poorer districts, but the bill's constitutionality is still under challenge in the courts.

In New Jersey, Democratic Governor James Florio did some fast backpedaling after prompting the state legislature to enact a Robin Hood plan last year that would have used $1.1 billion in state taxes to raise the level of funding in poor school districts. When affluent voters expressed outrage, Florio agreed to shift $360 million of the school aid back to property-tax relief. His political standing was badly damaged; at board of education meetings in Florham Park, N.J., angry parents showed up seeking to turn their public school district into a private one.

It is easy enough to condemn those self-protective actions as selfishness, but as author Kozol points out, in most cases better-off Americans simply have a narrower view of what they are doing. "They do not want poor children to be harmed," he writes, "they simply want the best for their own children." Those sentiments are echoed by New Jersey school-district superintendent Timothy Brennan, whose Holmdel district spends $7,450 per pupil, vs. $3,086 in the state's poorest jurisdiction. "The point of reform was to make all schools quality schools. But I fear that everything will settle into mediocrity." The belief even extends to children. Kozol spoke to a student in a wealthy New York City suburb whose family had moved from the problem-plagued Bronx. "There's no point in coming to a place like this, where schools are good," she said, "and then your taxes go back to the place where you began."

Yet 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. Fifth-grade teacher Madelyn Cimaglia has no doubt of the wonders that could be worked in San Antonio's Edgewood school district if more funds were available. Like thousands of her peers, Cimaglia supplements meager classroom supplies with her own money, buying her students books such as Alice in Wonderland and Charlotte's Web. "Our kids would fly if we had resources similar to the rich districts," she says.

With reporting by Deborah Fowler/Houston and Lisa H. Towle/New York