Education Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Kozol’s gift is to make skepticism sound like witness testimony. The line starts by granting his opponents their cleanest self-description: vouchers as “competition” that will “improve” public schools. That’s not concession so much as setup. By quoting the argument in its most palatable form, he frames it as a marketing pitch, then punctures it with a plainspoken refusal: “I don’t think it works that way.” The power is in the ordinariness. No policy jargon, no econometric sparring - just an insistence that the promised mechanism doesn’t match the lived outcome.

The subtext is that “competition” is a euphemism that launders ideology. In education politics, the market metaphor tends to smuggle in an assumption: schools are like firms, families are like consumers, and inequality is simply “choice.” Kozol has spent decades reporting from underfunded urban classrooms; when he says he’s “been watching this for a long time,” he’s invoking a moral timeline, not a résumé line. He’s signaling that vouchers don’t arrive in a vacuum - they arrive in systems already stratified by race, housing, and tax base, where the schools most likely to lose resources are the ones serving the kids with the fewest options.

Context matters: vouchers rose with Reagan-era privatization logic and later rebranded under bipartisan “reform.” Kozol’s sentence rejects the tidy story that competition disciplines institutions. His implied counterclaim is harsher: in public education, competition often functions as abandonment, draining political will from the shared project and reframing civic obligation as a shopping decision.