Sandra Tsing Loh: Cheer up, Jonathan Kozol!

Thanks to Anne for alerting me to this multilayered missive from humorist/bomb-throwing public-school advocate Sandra Tsing Loh to Jonathan "Shame of the Nation" Kozol. Loh's message to Kozol, whittled down, is: The public schools aren't actually the genocidal pits of racist squalor you make them out to be, and maybe small achievements rather than mobilizing the oppressed masses to storm the White House are making the changes.

Tales out of School
How a pushy, Type A mother stopped reading Jonathan Kozol and learned to love the public schools
by Sandra Tsing Loh
The Atlantic, March 2008

I am a longtime, rabid fan of Jonathan Kozol. Yea, I could show you my tower of dog-eared Kozolalia: The Shame of the Nation, Savage Inequalities, Prisoners of Silence, Illiterate America. In my mind, Kozol’s titles appear all in caps, like flaming Hebraic letters on the side of a monument. I am the sort of impressionable woman whose eyes seep tears while reading his heartrending descriptions of racial inequity in public education. Kozol doesn’t just decry what he sees as the pre-civil-rights-South level of segregation that persists to this day, the percentage of African American children in integrated schools having fallen to its lowest level since the death of Martin Luther King. For four decades, he has made visceral this tragic loss of human potential. Through his somber, exquisitely detailed accounts, I’ve watched countless poor black children begin as charmingly inquisitive and hopeful 5-year-olds, and then, as years pass, as concentric circles of chain-link fence close in, to the beat of that grim government drum, I’ve seen their once-bright spirits dim, heard their once-mellifluous questions ebb to dull monosyllables. I have ridden this roller coaster so often that at one point I took my tower of Kozols to my therapist’s office and despairingly set them on her glass coffee table, like a basket of orphaned kittens. Pfizer should develop a special antidepressant—“Zokol: for when you’ve read too much Kozol.”

Naturally this is the paragraph I love, though:

“Speaking of moral leaders, since your work is so admired by such magazines as Harper’s and The Nation, why don’t you simply exhort those readers to SEND THEIR KIDS TO PUBLIC SCHOOL? How many of those staffers’ kids are in elite privates? Talk about Shame of The Nation!”

Read the rest. It's hilarious.