Savage Inequalities

     Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities describes the horrific conditions of Morris High, a public high school in the Bronx, New York. There are holes in the walls and ceilings, missing curtains, leaky windows, and even a colony of wild mushrooms growing in the corner of one room. While disgusted, Kozol does not seem surprised by the condition that the school is in. Morris High is a racially segregated school and a last resort for many children who can not get into, or fail out of, other high schools. Kozol mentions the specialized high schools in the New York City school system, and how they receive the best teachers and more funding, leaving the kids at high schools like Morris with very little. 

  While reading this I felt sympathetic with the children of Morris, but I was not very surprised by their story. I was enrolled in New York City public schools until the eighth grade, and I know from visiting different public high schools that the conditions are not always good. Up until the ninth grade, the public schools in my area were considered to be really good, better than the majority of the Catholic schools around. But for high school my parents and I knew that I would have to attend a private/Catholic school, because for whatever reason, the NYC high schools were much less successful. 

  If someone was planning on going to a public high school, they usually aimed to get into one of the specialized schools such as Brooklyn Tech or Stuyvesant by taking a qualifying exam. I remember how my friends would stress over that test because they knew that it could decide the rest of their lives. If they didn’t get admitted to at least one of the specialized schools, they could be put into a risky situation. 

  Jonathan Kozol’s ideas about having several schools in each city that are almost as good as the specialized schools to give kids more options seem very logical to me. They would eliminate the pressure that is put on junior high school students to do extremely well on the specialized high school exam. And no matter what, no student should be expected to be able to do well in a school as dilapidated as Morris High.