Kozol begins chapter eight by discussing the program Higher Horizons, started in 1959 serving 60,000 New York City children. The program originally spent $50 more per students then children who were not involved in the program. That $50 later turned into $27 until the program eventually was closed down. “Seven years after it began, the program had been evaluated by independent researchers from New York University. As the Civil Rights Commission noted, the researchers found no measurable improvement in the academic achievement of participating children and…could find no meaningful differences between those children who attended segregated schools that had this program and those in segregated schools that had not been a part of this experiment” (p.189). Amazing how all of the money spent had little to no impact. Kozol goes on to review other programs that originally may have had good intentions, but just as similar to Higher Horizons had a hard time living up to their promises and showed little to no improvements. Kozol also brings up the different presidents that had promised large impacts in education that were never capable of fulfilling them. This did not surprise me. Education seems to be a big campaigning issue, but I have never seen a president actually live up to all of their promises. Kozol mentions presidents such as Johnson, Regan, and both of the Bushs. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is a program that all teachers can see is not as successfully as initially planned.
“Before we gave up on integration, we should have tried it” (p.216). In chapter nine, Kozol finally talks about solutions. The only problem is that he came up with the same solution that most people have….this is a battle that there is not just one solution. That even Kozol, one of the leaders in our movement to a better education system, cannot come up with all concrete answers. Kozol discusses conversations that he has had with education and some of the solutions that they have talked about. It is difficult to know that no matter what we want for education, it is going to be a struggle for a very long time. Kozol went to talk to Gary Orfield, who wrote many books on desegregation and resegregation. Orfield said, “A political movement is a necessary answer…We cannot look to the courts to do it in the present age. We cannot look to the two political parties, the Republicans and Democrats, to do it. We need to reach out to a broader sector of the nation to initiate a struggle” (pp. 221-222). Kozol discusses schools that have been successful in the desegregation, such as a school in the Chicago area. The school had been successful and some of the students even said that before they may not have been motivated to go to college, but that now they want to. These are the types of schools that we need to have, but it will talk time and for everyone to have the same goals.
