Children's Advocate Kozol to Speak on University of Arkansas Campus

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Jonathan Kozol

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Over the past 40 years, Jonathan Kozol has visited schools, written books, lectured across the nation, lobbied Congress and fasted – losing 29 pounds, according to the Boston Globe – to raise awareness of educational challenges facing poor, inner-city children.

Kozol, a children's advocate and award-winning author of several books examining the plight of these students, will speak Tuesday, Oct. 26 on the University of Arkansas campus. The Winthrop Rockefeller Distinguished Lecture Series event at 6:30 p.m. in the Verizon Ballroom in the Arkansas Union is free and open to the public. Kozol's visit is co-sponsored by the College of Education and Health Professions and the university's doctoral program in public policy.

America's schools continue to be racially segregated well into the 21st century, Kozol wrote in Shame of the Nation, published in 2005. The book outlines conditions Kozol found when visiting and revisiting nearly 60 public schools in 30 districts in 11 states. In describing the educational opportunities of many inner-city children, Kozol uses the word apartheid, a term most commonly known as the formerly legal system of separation of the races in South Africa.

"They live an apartheid existence and attend apartheid schools," he wrote. "Few of them know white children any longer."

The proportion of black children now attending integrated public schools is at a lower level than in any year since 1968, according to Kozol.

Brinck Kerr, University of Arkansas professor of political science and director of the public policy program, said, "We are really looking forward to Mr. Kozol's visit to the University of Arkansas. His visit represents an excellent opportunity for our students and faculty as well as other educators and the public to learn more about how to reverse the tide of re-segregation of U.S. public schools and how to increase educational opportunities for children who currently attend under-resourced public schools."

Kerr co-authored the proposal to bring Kozol to the Fayetteville campus with Tom Smith, dean of the College of Education and Health Professions, and Paul Hewitt, assistant professor of educational leadership.

In addition to writing and speaking around the nation, Kozol spends time in Washington, talking with elected representatives about reducing the punitive aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act and increasing the incentives and rewards that can encourage urban districts. In 2007, he lost 29 pounds on a partial fast to protest the reauthorization of the education accountability law, the Boston Globe reported. He founded and manages Education Action, a nonprofit organization dedicated to repealing portions of the No Child Left Behind Act and opposing policies that promote re-segregation of public schools in the United States.

A former fourth-grade teacher in Boston during the height of the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, Kozol was fired for teaching a Langston Hughes poem to his class. He left teaching to devote himself to the issues facing public education and the challenge of providing equal opportunity within public schools to every child, regardless of race or economic level.

His first book was Death at an Early Age, a chronicle of his first year as a teacher. It was published in 1967 and received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion. His other books include Rachel and Her Children, a study of homeless mothers and their children, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for 1989 and the Conscience in Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and Savage Inequalities, which won the New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

His 1995 bestseller, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, described his visits to the South Bronx of New York, the poorest congressional district of America. It received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Kozol most recently wrote Letters to a Young Teacher, published in 2007. It draws upon his four decades of experience to guide the newest generation of teachers. It describes the chemistry of love and trust that evolve between a gifted teacher and her students while also offering practical solutions to day-to-day dilemmas teachers face.

Additional support for Kozol's visit is provided by the African and African American studies program, the Brown Chair in English Literacy, the Graduate School, the Honors College, the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, the Multicultural Center, the office of diversity, the office of the provost, the School of Law, the School of Social Work, Student Support Services and the Teaching and Faculty Support Center.