Time & Perspective Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Kozol is doing two things at once: granting the moral drama of Brown v. Board while quietly insisting that the real story is administrative, measurable, and therefore politically actionable. “Terrific progress” is deliberately plainspoken, almost unliterary. It’s not there to dazzle; it’s there to foreclose the familiar dodge that desegregation was a noble idea that “didn’t work.” He’s staking a claim that it did work, at least when it was actually implemented at scale.

The quote’s engine is its pairing of concrete action with empirical consequence. “Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially” signals logistics, not symbolism: buses rerouted, attendance zones redrawn, court orders enforced, families forced to live inside a new social geometry. Then Kozol lands the point policymakers hate most: achievement gaps narrowed. The subtext is a rebuke to the modern habit of treating the gap as a natural condition or a cultural pathology. If the gap shrank under integration, then separation is not neutral; it’s an intervention with predictable outcomes.

Context matters because Kozol writes against the amnesia of the post-civil-rights era, when resegregation accelerated through housing patterns, district lines, “choice” policies, and uneven funding while public rhetoric shifted to individual responsibility. By anchoring the argument in the decades after Brown, he’s also reminding readers that progress wasn’t a vibe; it was the result of sustained federal pressure and local compliance. Take away the enforcement, and you don’t just lose a principle-you lose the gains.