Savage Inequalities

Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, published in 1991, is an investigative work of nonfiction that grew out of his reporting for The New Yorker. Kozol, a former teacher and longstanding critic of American public education, spent time in and around schools in poor urban and rural districts, and he contrasts them with wealthy suburban schools in the same metropolitan areas. The book is organized largely as a series of place-based chapters, moving through cities including East St. Louis, Chicago, New York City, Camden, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., among others. Kozol describes overcrowded classrooms, crumbling buildings, inadequate heating and plumbing, limited textbooks, and the absence of basic science facilities, while nearby suburban schools in the same state often feature modern laboratories, swimming pools, and generous per-pupil spending. He attributes these disparities chiefly to the American system of financing public schools through local property taxes, which ties school resources to local wealth and produces stark inequality between districts. A central argument is that racial and economic segregation remains embedded in the structure of American schooling, even decades after Brown v. Board of Education. Kozol interviews students, teachers, and administrators, giving space to young people who articulate their awareness of the unequal conditions they face and their skepticism about promises of equal opportunity. He also examines funding formulas, court decisions, and political resistance to desegregation and to redistributing resources across district lines. Savage Inequalities is credited with bringing the term “savage inequalities” into broader discussion of school funding and with shaping 1990s debates over educational equity. It is widely assigned in education, sociology, and public policy courses as a foundational account of structural inequality in U.S. schools.