In Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol argues that America's public school system has been victimized by ongoing segregation which locks school-age children into a static caste system; he uses Francis Keppel's term caste (63, 80, 199) denotatively to describe a social and economic structure whose restrictions it is impossible to supersede in spite of the popular (and flawed) notion that America is the land of opportunity. Kozol charges that funding is systematically withheld from poorer schools, and he uses this claim of fact as the basis for a cause-and effect argument: poor educative conditions result in inferior education, grave academic deficiency in students, and a reinforcing the stereotypes of both affluence and indigence.
Kozol's book is the result of his investigation of inner-city schools between 1988 and 1990. He documents the sharp impoverishment of under-funded schools--almost exclusively non-white--in St. Louis, Camden, New York, Chicago, Washington, Cincinnati, and San Antonio. Over the course of his private investigation, he reveals the squalid at best, and toxic at worst, conditions that poor children endure to attend dilapidated schools with insufficient supplies, teachers and counselors. As he travels from school to school and digs deeper into the problem, he discovers that monies are unfairly and even boldly diverted from the needy to the affluent, creating what he sees as "private schools within the public system." (107) This outcome is the result of a tax system that is inherently unequal and of a callousness that runs deep within those most able to make a difference. Therefore, although Savage Inequalities is ostensibly a study of the deployment of school funding, Kozol also begs the moral and philosophical question of the duty of the haves to the have nots, and indeed of the possibility that money corrupts.
One criterion in analyzing a study of this sort is that the author implements a tone that is...