Education Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Kozol’s line has the blunt moral clarity of someone who has spent decades watching public schools get asked to do more with less, then blamed for the predictable results. “Opposed” isn’t technocratic caution; it’s a refusal to launder inequality through policy. The phrase “public funds” is doing heavy lifting here, invoking a civic bargain: taxpayers underwrite a common institution that, in return, serves everyone. Once that money is redirected to “private education,” the bargain starts to look like a subsidy for opting out.

The subtext is less about pedagogy than power. Vouchers, tuition tax credits, and other “choice” mechanisms are often marketed as liberation for families. Kozol’s objection presses on the uncomfortable second act: choice is rarely evenly distributed. Private schools can select students, dodge certain accountability rules, and operate within social networks that already concentrate advantage. Public dollars flowing into that ecosystem don’t just follow children; they quietly reshape the map of who is obligated to educate whom.

Context matters because Kozol’s career is essentially a long argument that American education is structured by segregation, housing policy, and resource hoarding more than by classroom talent. In that frame, funding private alternatives isn’t neutral pluralism; it’s a political decision to starve the one system that cannot legally refuse the hardest, costliest work. The sentence works because it’s both narrow and incendiary: a budget line that doubles as a moral line.