"Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools"
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A thousand dollars is the kind of number that sounds small until you attach it to a child. Kozol’s genius is to pick a figure that’s concrete enough to indict, but modest enough to expose the real scandal: this isn’t a one-off “failing school,” it’s a routine shortfall baked into the system. The adverbs do most of the political work. “Nationally” preempts the comforting idea that segregation and underfunding are regional relics. “Overwhelmingly” refuses the euphemism of “diverse,” forcing the reader to picture racial concentration as a governing condition, not a demographic footnote.
Kozol’s intent is less to shock with cruelty than to puncture the myth of American neutrality. Per-pupil funding is supposed to be an objective accounting mechanism; he weaponizes it as moral evidence. The subtext is that we’ve laundered racial hierarchy through spreadsheets. You don’t have to say “racism” when the budget does it for you. The framing also implicates policy choices that hide behind local control: property-tax-based funding, district lines that map neatly onto housing segregation, and the political insulation of affluent, predominantly white communities from shared obligation.
Context matters because Kozol has spent decades translating structural inequality into legible, personal terms. This sentence is an elevator pitch for that project: a quiet, devastating way of saying the achievement gap isn’t a mystery of culture or effort. It’s a receipt.
Kozol’s intent is less to shock with cruelty than to puncture the myth of American neutrality. Per-pupil funding is supposed to be an objective accounting mechanism; he weaponizes it as moral evidence. The subtext is that we’ve laundered racial hierarchy through spreadsheets. You don’t have to say “racism” when the budget does it for you. The framing also implicates policy choices that hide behind local control: property-tax-based funding, district lines that map neatly onto housing segregation, and the political insulation of affluent, predominantly white communities from shared obligation.
Context matters because Kozol has spent decades translating structural inequality into legible, personal terms. This sentence is an elevator pitch for that project: a quiet, devastating way of saying the achievement gap isn’t a mystery of culture or effort. It’s a receipt.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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