Jonathan Kozol has been a tireless advocate for civil rights in education for the past five decades. His book, Savage Inequalities, was a call to conscience for the nation. He will be among the speakers at the Save Our Schools March and Rally in Washington, DC, on Saturday, July 30th. I asked him to explain his reasons for marching this summer. 

You published Savage Inequalities back in 1992. What has happened to the level of inequity in our schools in the two decades since then?

The inequalities are greater now than in '92. Some states have equalized per-pupil spending but they set the "equal level" very low, so that wealthy districts simply raise extra money privately. And, even within a single urban district, parents in rich neighborhoods cluster together at a single school, then hold fund-raisers for that school, using celebrities to pull out a wealthy crowd, and raise as much as half-a-million dollars in a single night. No one forces them to share this money with the schools for poor kids that might be just three blocks away. The system is more savage now than ever.

Our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is fond of saying that "Education is the civil rights issue of our time." Is he right about that?

Arne Duncan is recycling exactly the same slogan George W. Bush invented. On its face, it sounds benign. But, in reality, Duncan's policies run directly counter to the purposes of civil rights. He doesn't lift a finger to address the glaring fact that public schools for black and Latino kids from coast to coast are now more wildly and shamefully segregated than in any year since 1968. I walk into high schools, with as many as 3,000 students, from Chicago to Los Angeles, from Dallas to Miami, from Denver to New York, and in an entire day I might see ten white students. It's like the bull in the China shop. Duncan pretends it isn't there. But, by his passivity, he's hammering the final nails into the coffin of Brown vs. Board of Education. Meanwhile, he's eagerly doing "Plessy v. Ferguson," pretending he knows how to make separate and unequal schools into bastions of success by relentless testing and humiliation of the teachers.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today. And anyone like Duncan who attempts to tell us otherwise is guilty of historical myopia.

How do you see the rise of charter schools affecting racial and economic segregation in our schools?

Charter schools are far more segregated than most other public schools. This was pretty much predictable. Charter schools with names like those I see repeatedly -- "Black Success Academy," "African-American Academy for Leadership and Enterprise" -- are not likely to attract too many Irish or Italian kids. On the opposite side, trendy new white charter schools with upper-class, vaguely artsy innuendo in their names -- I call them "the woodsy Walden schools" -- are obviously targeted at children of a social/racial category that does not include the kids of immigrants from Mexico or Ethiopia.

The "niche" effect of charter schools guarantees a swift and vicious deepening of class and racial separation. President Obama -- who was educated in very good and integrated schools and sends his children to an integrated and exclusive private school -- is now acting on the belief that consciously and unashamedly segregated charter schools represent the answer to the race-gap in America.

The president wouldn't send his own kids to these kinds of schools. Why does he think they're good enough for black and Latino kids whose parents did not go to Harvard Law School?

A related point: The testing agenda that Duncan is perpetuating is segregative and divisive in yet another sense. ...

Click here to continue reading.