Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America

Jonathan Kozol has been writing about America's poorest children for over twenty-five years. I'm pretty sure I've been reading his books for almost twenty. As a child myself, his books showed me a world utterly different than my profoundly rural environment--a world I knew I needed to be part of, in one way or another. More so, his books taught me that "bearing witness" to injustice could itself be a form of social action. I'm glad to say, however, that in twenty-five years he has gone from bearing witness to becoming an educational advocate and tireless fundraiser for a new generation of children. He and Martha Overall, the minister with whom he works, have established a fund to address the needs of the children in the South Bronx community he has been profiling for so long, whether those needs are school supplies, a winter coat, or private school tuition.

What frustrates me to no end, though (and what I imagine frustrates him) is that the children they help remain the exception to the rule. They're the kids who stand out in a crowd. I'm reminded of the child who--it turns out this is not his real name, but I know him from Amazing Grace as "Anthony," so I'll stick with that--caught Kozol's attention because as a young adolescent he had befriended a local poet, liked to read Poe, and was writing his first novel. Kozol and Martha Overall managed to enroll Anthony in an excellent private school. Anthony was about two or three years younger than I, and we actually shared a strange connection in that the year I was a senior in college, he applied as a freshman, complete with a letter of recommendation from Kozol and a copy of Amazing Grace with the relevant chapters highlighted. Anthony's application galvanized the admissions office. The Director was convinced that a student with his background could not adapt to our rural environment and that his writing skills were inadequate for him to succeed at our writing-intensive school. The students on the Admissions Committee were adamant that Anthony should be given a chance. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe we would have been setting him up for failure, as the Director predicted. There's no way to know.

In reading Fire in the Ashes I was thrilled to learn that "Anthony," now referred to by his real name, had attended a different college, graduated in four years, and was on his way to becoming a teacher or social worker. But as Kozol readily acknowledges, kids like Anthony are the exception, and they will remain so until there is systemic change in how our nation funds education. Kozol understands what others don't, which is that while individual states may decide that the disparate funding of education is unconstitutional (even if they can't figure out how to fix the problem), the Supreme Court ruled in Rodriguez that funding schemes based on property values are just fine, provided they don't lead to intentional discrimination. Absent a new case before the Supreme Court that questions the ruling of Rodriguez, possibly on the grounds that the way we fund education has led to de facto segregation and a new version of separate and unequal, there will be no systemic change, and 99 kids out of 100 will not be as lucky as Anthony.

Most of the stories in Fire in the Ashes are success stories, as if fitting, since these are the kids in whose lives fate intervened. But some are not. There are also accidents, suicides, drug addiction, failure. I'm left with the feeling that Kozol is more or less pointing out the gross inadequacy of his project. I picked these kids out and intervened in their lives, he seems to be saying, and not all of them succeeded. What happened to the 99 out of 100 I was unable to help?