Writer and longtime activist Jonathan Kozol said he considers Gov. Andrew Cuomo a friend, but he was “utterly shocked” by the governor’s comments back in August that schools which are exhibiting poor academic performance should face a “death penalty.”
“Governor Andrew Cuomo has been kind and friendly to me for many many years as was his father,” Kozol told a rapt audience which had gathered for an anti-poverty conference sponsored by the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy, a prominent Albany organization.
But he added, I was utterly shocked,” by the death penalty comments.
Cuomo’s remarks came in late August in Buffalo during a talk with reporters about what to do with failing schools.
“There is going to be have to be a death penalty for failing schools,” Cuomo said, adding that kids have to come before the bureaucracy that supports them.
“If the school fails, the school has to end,” Cuomo went on, saying that options could include takeovers by the state or charter schools.
“I don’t want Albany to sit there and tell communities how to run their schools but I do feel comfortable sitting in Albany and saying failing schools is not an option,” Cuomo said at the time.
Kozol, who has been critical of charters and who believes inner-city schools are under-funded, said the answer is improving the teaching corps and spending a lot more money.
“You improve a good school by nurturing good teachers and pouring in resources,” he said.
Known for his work in the impoverished South Bronx and for books such as “Savage Inequalities,” and “Death at an Early Age,” Kozol has for decades been unwavering in his call for more resources in needy schools and in pointing out the vast disparities in opportunity between wealthy and poor kids.
He stayed true to that theme during his brief talk on Thursday, at SUNY’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Albany.
Wealthy two-year-olds in New York City, he noted, attend $28,000-per-year pre-schools while their impoverished counterparts in the Bronx suffer rotting teeth for the lack of dental care and frequently reside in households where the phone is cut off on a regular basis.
Schools in places such as Poughkeepsie, the South Bronx, parts of Chicago and East Los Angeles are virtually all black or Hispanic — part of what Kozol said was a de facto state of educational apartheid.
Kozol was just as hard on the current testing craze that is hitting even elementary grade students. He said he was recently in one school where third graders are supposed to “produce a narrative procedure.”
“I have an English degree from Harvard. I have no idea what that means,” he told the teacher. The reply: “It means tell a story.”
Despite suffering the after-effects of what he described as a complicated cataract operation and enduring a trip on a seven-passenger plane from his home base in Boston, Kozol didn’t hold back in excoriating his detractors, some of whom believe he has focused too much on simply spending more money on the nation’s schools.
Commentators for Fox News, he said, were “psychopaths,” albeit smart ones who use words with “surgical precision,” he said.
Nor did test-happy education governing boards escape his wrath. He made an oblique reference to the Regents as the “Board of Punishment and Terror.”
Cuomo was not at the event but he may have been there in spirit — hanging in the entrance way to the Nano college’s gleaming auditorium were two larger-than-life posters depicting the governor, along with President Barack Obama who last year visited the college.
The Capitol Confidential team: