From the Ground Up

    The main focus of From the Ground up is on the fundamental power imbalance between a community and a multi-million dollar corporation and the government process through which their interactions filter. Often the siting process is captured by the corporation through the promise of tax revenue and the potential of new industry in the area. As the environmental justice movement grows, it becomes clear that the placement of waste treatment facilities go the path of least resistance by placing them where the fewest people are likely to protest, which are perceived to be communities of lower socioeconomic backgrounds, often largely made up of racial minorities. From the Ground Up describes ways in which communities are able to force companies to account for them and affect the decision-making process to take back some level of control so that communities can take part in the siting process that all waste treatment facilities must go through to obtain a permit. Cole and Foster, both lawyers experienced in environmental law, write,

    "Because environmental justice struggles are at heart political and economic struggles, a legal response is often inappropriate or unavailable. In fact, bringing a lawsuit may ensure certain loss of the struggle at hand or cause significant dis-empowerment of community residents. Tactically, taking environmental problems out of the streets and into courts has proven, in many instances, to be a mistake. In struggles between private industry and a host community, there are two types of power: the power of money and the power of people. Private industry has the money, while communities have the people; this disparity in resources is evident in many environmental justice cases, such as those litigated in Buttonwillow and in Chester" (129).

    What the authors are saying is that moving the disagreement back to traditional channels shifts the advantage back to the corporations which have the money and access to the court system to affect the decision, while at the same time reducing the impact of community voices. The cases that are described in From the Ground Up concern either the expansion of existing treatment facilities or the placement of new ones, meaning that communities are fighting to prevent additional pollution on the grounds that the facility locations are concentrated disproportionally in their community. To successfully litigate a case of racial discrimination, in most cases  the community must prove that there is racially discriminatory INTENT in the placement of facilities, which is difficult.

    More commonly lawsuits focus on the permitting process breaking existing laws by not properly informing the community and soliciting responses from those the decisions most affect. In these cases, a corporation should have informed the citizens by placing ads in the newspaper, posting signs at the site, or sending mail notices. However, this process is often not completed in any way that would successfully inform, giving the community an opportunity to sue. For example, in Kettleman City, Chemical Waste Management, Inc. printed notices in a newspaper printed forty miles away, posted signs on a fence post three and a half miles from the town, and sent mail notices to landowners situated directly adjacent to the land  meaning agribusiness and oil companies like Chevron (2). In this case and others, the corporations follow the letter of the law but not the intent, meaning again that it may be difficult to win a lawsuit by proving that the community was not sufficiently informed.

    Litigation may have a different place in a suit concerning pollution due to negligence. For example, a waste treatment facility that has improperly protected local soil and water from pollution may be sued for damages. This is unrelated to environmental racism excepting the fact that more waste facilities are situated near minority communities meaning those communities are more likely to be victims of improper waste disposal and as Dr. Bullard said, less likely to be informed or protected when there is an incident.  By focusing on the siting process, the authors claim that the best defense against the harmful effects of waste disposal facilities concentrating in their community is to be aware and active enough to prevent that from happening in the first place.

    From the Ground Up is more about political involvement than environmental issues. It reminded me of local political issues that come up in town council meetings. I remember a few years ago in my hometown of Harrisburg (near Charlotte) we had a short burst of political involvement over the proposed placement of a few big box stores (Walmart/ Lowe's/ Target). Town council meetings are generally pretty boring, dealing with mundane issues like zoning. When people get involved it is because they are paying attention to issues that directly affect them. For example, in my town the no-big box movement was lead by people living in a certain neighborhood that would be right next to the proposed Walmart shopping center. Then other people got involved as those original people convinced others that the new Walmart would negatively affect the community and hurt our "small-town" image. It was interesting to see how involved people got in these issues, to the point that we actually elected a few new town-council members on anti-big box platforms, beating town council members who had been elected for years.

 

This video has been creatively edited to make Hagler say aye repeatedly but gives a good idea of how boring town council meetings can be, even on fairly controversial issues like the big box stores in Harrisburg. It is easy to see how certain interests are able to operate under the radar of residents.

     Also, it is amazing how entrenched in local politics just a few families are in Harrisburg. There are a few town council members who have been elected for years, facing virtually no competition and you see a lot of the same last names. We have had the same mayor for nearly twenty-five years and he has run unopposed quite often in my memory. From the Ground Up is about people not often involved in politics empowering themselves by finding ways to influence the political system in their favor.

    Maybe you have heard of the recent water system hearings in Asheville? Asheville Citizen-Times

    When the class discussed Marked I was really surprised by how many people used anecdotal evidence of working with felons to make a point that there are reasons employers may not want to hire them. I'm certainly no expert on felons, and to my knowledge have never worked with a convicted felon, but it does surprise me that so many people stereotype a group of people based on certain common experiences. I guess what Dr. Hobby was saying about the difference in the prison system of rehabilitation vs. punishment is really evident here in our assumptions about felons. A person who has in the past committed a felony can no longer be trusted because past actions reflect on their future. Their prison sentence was punishment for crimes committed. Being released from prison does not mean the person will not commit another felony. Instead it is just the opposite. A person who has proven themselves untrustworthy in the past will do so again in the future, because past actions give people an indication of future behavior. The classification of felon will follow that person throughout his or her life, affecting potential employment possibilities. Even people who have managed to rehabilitate themselves and really do not want to commit more crimes will have difficulty re-integrating into a society that no longer trusts them.

    Honestly I can absolutely see why a potential employer, given the choice between a person convicted of a felony and a person not convicted of a felony, would choose to employ a person not convicted of a felony. I don't see it the same way I would as an employer hiring on a racial basis, since the person has in the past actually done something illegal and until that person proves otherwise, he or she is going to be judged by past behavior. However, the study described in Marked finds that potential employers are more likely to hire Whites with criminal backgrounds than Blacks with no criminal background, meaning that employers are not always discriminating on criminal backgrounds but are definitely discriminating on a racial basis.

    Also, it is a concern that a felon would have such trouble finding a job when he or she needs a job to provide for themselves. If the person can't earn enough money in a legal way to survive, he or she is much more likely to turn to earning money outside the law leading to repeat convictions. This is definitely a problem that affects racial minorities considering the study's findings that Blacks with felony convictions are less able than their White counterparts to find employment.

    I don't know what the solution is to this sort of discrimination. Are there tax breaks for employers hiring felons? Maybe some kind of halfway house program for felons released from prison that will both provide job training and personal references to employers hesitant to trust and hire a person who has committed a felony in the past. I think the first problem is that our prison system punishes instead of rehabilitates, meaning that there is no effort within the prison system to figure out why the felony was committed in the first place and address those problems if they can be addressed. In these cases I'm thinking of mostly drug charges. Maybe then a person coming out of a rehabilitation program that teaches job skills would have a positive impact on society's perception of convicts.

Unequal Childhoods

This may be a weird connection to make but I couldn't help but think of Unequal Childhoods while I was reading The Hunger Games for my Political Science Fiction class. We had a prompt the other day in class to compare some aspect of the book to the United States and my response was influenced by Unequal Childhoods.

In The Hunger Games, Katness lives in District 12, the coal mining district. Each of the 12 districts produces a certain resource for the Capital and there is a very limited range of professions available to people in these districts. Katness' father was a coal miner and most children expect to also be involved in this industry when they turn 18. Schools in the region exist mainly as a means of propaganda distribution by the Capital, not to teach and prepare students for further education or different professions. While it is true there are merchants and townspeople at a social class above Katness, most of the district is composed of members of what Katness calls the Seam. The Seam is composed of poor and hungry coalmining families.

Within District 12 there are harsh lines of socioeconomic class between members of the Seam and townspeople, however there are even harsher lines between districts. What your skill  set is depends on where you have grown up. People in District 4 know how to fish because they live on the coast and people in District 3 know how to create mechanical things because they produce electronics for the Capital. People in District 8 mainly produce textiles, so they work in factories their whole lives (the revolution starts in the factories).

Two children from each district are chosen to compete in the hunger games, which are basically events held each year where children from each district fight to the death to reestablish Capital control after the districts rebelled decades before the book takes place. In the hunger games, the idea is that each child has an equal chance of winnning when that is not the case at all. To begin with the children are chosen from between the ages of 12 to 17 so there is an immediate disadvantage to 12 year olds. Other advantages fall to children of wealthier districts who are well-fed and trained to compete in the games. For children of District 12 who are often malnourished and without knowledge of weapons, the games are equivalent to a death sentence.

In my mind, The Hunger Games is similar to the result of different kinds of upbringing depicted in Unequal Childhoods. Districts that have the resources and ability to do so train their children to suceed in the games while parents in less wealthy districts also want their children to succeed but simply do not have the resources or knowledge  to prepare their children the way that other districts can. It isn't that the children in poor districts aren't learning anything since they often come to the games with skills unique to their districts. It is just that they are not trained the way wealthier districts are.

One other thing I thought was interesting was the hint in the book that where you are born determines you as a person. For the people in the Capital, the games are a source of entertainment and throughout the book Katness writes them off as frivolous for worrying about their own entertainment when she is likely to die. After she gets to know her prep team, she acutualy thinks "I feel bad about how I go around feeling so superior to them. Who knows who I would be or what I would talk about if I'd been raised in the Capital?"

The Hunger Games are definitely written for young adults and are pretty quick reads. However I think there are a lot of interesting concepts and ways to interpret the story. In my political science class we will likely be talking more about the revolution described in the final book.

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

Tatum referenced this essay in her book. I had read it before, and it definitely made me think. While I have not experienced a lot of what she talks about (for example I have never tried to buy a house), some of the statements were thought-provoking. For example, the colors of band-aids are supposedly meant to represent flesh, but are white (I looked up whether there is still a flesh toned crayon and there was but it was renamed peach in 1962).

Cosmopolitanism

What I take from Cosmopolitanism is that it is important to understand the value systems in place in different cultures. For example, Appiah uses the example of a doctor trying to save a Jehovah’s Witness from dying of blood loss with a transfusion. However, the woman’s culture prohibits the donation of blood through a strict interpretation of the Bible verse prohibiting eating blood. As a doctor, it is your job to save her life if you have the ability to do so. What do you do in this situation? 

This somewhat reminds me of the arguments concerning keeping someone alive who has suffered such extreme brain damage that they will not wake up and will not be able to live without machines keeping them alive. In these cases it is up to the family of the individual or the individual’s living will to determine whether to keep this person alive. If you remember the case of Terry Schiavo from a few years ago, her husband wanted to remove her feeding tube while her parents wanted to keep her alive. The doctors had the ability to keep her alive indefinitely despite quality of life arguments against doing so. The court case ended with the determination that her feeding tube should be removed.

This video is heavily biased against the results of the Terry Schiavo case, indicating the differences in opinions on ethical standards felt by people even within the United States.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cki55BM42kw

In these kinds of situations we expect the individual’s in question to decide for themselves in advance whether to live in a vegetative state or to choose to die. While it is unlike the blood transfusion question above in that the doctor is unable to fully cure the individual, it is similar in that a person’s individual quality of life wishes are important and respected when they are expressed. 

This may seem an argument in favor of cultural relativism but it is not. In both of these cases the question was down to individual preference in societies that enabled the individual to make informed decisions regarding consent (I am assuming in the case of the Jehovah’s Witness). Since Terry Schiavo did not have a living will it was unknown what she would have wanted herself, but there was significant input from family and the judicial system attempting to do what was best for her with significant input from both sides. I think individual preference should be respected, however when it is the result of a culture’s standards and values it becomes more difficult to navigate. If I grew up a Jehovah’s Witness I would likely not want a blood transfusion either and I would expect a doctor to respect my wishes. However, since I did not grow up within that religion, I would prefer a blood transfusion to death.

 If it is this difficult to navigate moral issues even within similar societies, how do we expect to solve cross-cultural ethical behavior? I do not think the answer is that we cannot judge, but I think there has to be some understanding given to the culture in general. Like Appiah wrote, a discussion of values and reasoning surrounding cultural practices that we disagree with are important. However, I wonder what the end goal of this sort of reasoning is. If we disagree with a practice, even after understanding the culture associated with it, are we meant to step in and end it? For example, Appiah uses the example of female circumcision. He writes that it is a practice young women are proud of and excited to go through as a test of bravery. If I still disagree with it, what do I do? Is the point of this exercise to determine that I am allowed to judge another culture’s practices or is it to determine whether I am allowed to forcibly end another culture’s practices, imposing my values on theirs? I think I am perfectly allowed to judge another culture and say it is wrong but I do not know whether I would be comfortable being the one in charge of ending it.

What I take from Cosmopolitanism is that it is important in a globalized world to be respectful and open to cultures not our own. I do not really see it as a guide to navigating issues where cultures conflict.

Creating Capabilities

In Creatin Capabilities, Martha Nussbaum discusses why per capita GDP is a poor indicator of well-being in an economy. Per capita gross domestic product is the value goods and services produced within the country divided by the country’s population. This average can hide huge inequalities in income and well being, which measurements like Nussbaum’s try to overcome. Putting aside per capita GDP, it is possible to assess and compare countries on numerous other qualities that may give a better indication of conditions inside the country. For example the Human Development Index measures well-being based on literacy and education as well as income. Professors Dr. Gibney and Dr. Cornett from UNCA work on the Political Terror Scale, which measures the levels of political violence and terror that people in countries feel on a five point scale.

Political Terror Scale

            Per capita GDP can mask inequalities within a country in addition to human development issues. Something I have been interested in is the income inequalities in so-called first-world countries like the United States. A few years ago I went to a talk by behavioral economist Dan Ariely here at UNCA. His talk about rationally irrational behavior was really interesting and you all should check it out especially if you liked Freakanomics. However, what really interested me was his blog which I looked at after his talk.

          Dan Ariely's Blog

            At the time, he was looking for participants to take a survey based on income inequalities. He requested participants choose the division of wealth in a society that the participant would most like to live in by looking at pie charts depicting the division of wealth between five quintiles representing a fifth of the country’s population in each, divided by wealth.

Near total income equality

84% of wealth concentrated in top 20% of population (this is the United States)

Sweden

The participant was told that they would be dropped into this country with equal change of ending up in any of the five quintiles. By using John Rawls’ original position theory, Ariely seemed to believe that with no prior knowledge of their position in the society, the participant would choose the country with the greatest equity of wealth between the five wealth levels. The participant should choose the countries in which he or she will have the greatest chance of not being dirt poor.

            Take a Simlar Quiz!

The first few pie charts showing the divisions of wealth are unlabeled, leaving the participant to choose based on the actual divisions of wealth one sees in the chart. Later in the survey, the pie charts are labeled with countries like Great Britain and Haiti, indicating that the wealth division pie chart represents the wealth division in the labeled country.

In this experiment, Ariely seemed to be attempting to understand not what kind of wealth equity people desire in a society in which they are not guaranteed a certain place, but how people choose given little information. It is likely that a participant who chose to live in Haiti’s unmarked wealth division pie chart over Great Britain’s would likely choose the reverse given a labeled pie chart. The pie charts have not changed with the inclusion of labels, only the participant’s perception of the pie charts has changed. Perhaps people have more faith in first world societies ability to provide for its people despite unequal distribution of wealth. Even with the facts in place, regardless of wealth distribution despite that being the question, people will likely choose to live in countries they consider wealthier by comparison.

This is relevant today because of the recent attention to inequalities in wealth in the United States in the Occupy Wall Street movements as well as in the presidential campaign. This article at PBS describes the gains in wealth to the top one percent in recent years.

Land of the Free, Home of the Poor

Source

 

If anyone is interested, Ariely’s resulting article was published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, titled Building a Better America, One Wealth Quintile at a Time, available in pdf form if you google it: 

https://www.google.com/search?q=building+a+better+america%E2%80%94one+wealth+quintile+at+a+time&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Waiting for Superman

            Waiting for Superman brought up some really interesting things that I had never considered before. So often we blame society, poor funding, and standardized testing for the problems in schools, but we rarely consider poor teaching to be a significant issue. Of course we have all have had poor experiences with teachers, but I never thought of it as a systemic problem. The saying, ‘those who cannot do, teach’ is really untrue. I think that some people are just naturally better at teaching than others, but it is a skill that can be developed and improved. Having programs in place to teach teachers how to be better at their job may help resolve some of these issues as well as somehow weeding out people who just should not be teaching at all.

            Some people, even with all the training in the world, may just not be good teachers or have any desire to be good teachers. In middle school I had a science teacher who told us straight out that she did not want to be teaching. Her husband had an accident and was no longer able to work so she had to get a job and chose teaching for some reason. Her method of teaching was to assign us during class to read the chapter we were studying and then answer questions in the workbook on a separate piece of paper. She would then read out the answers and we were supposed to write out the ones we missed. Our test for each chapter would be the exact questions, in the same order, in the workbook we had already gone over in class. Needless to say, I made an A in that class, but I learned absolutely nothing.

            However, I do have a problem with the blame for poor student performance being placed directly and only on the teachers. Geoffrey Canada said that teachers had to accept that their students came from dysfunctional home situations and that was not an excuse for those same students not learning. However, I think it takes a very good teacher to overcome these sort of issues and instill a desire to learn in his or her students. In an ideal world every teacher would be an excellent teacher, but I think there is a huge demand for teachers that is just not always being met. In Shame of the Nation, Kozol wrote about how often the teachers shuffled around, some classes having several teachers in the same year because they cannot handle the pressure. I think the problem starts with the fact that we do not pay teachers enough to teach in difficult teaching environments. Kozol wrote that teachers who work in segregated schools make much less money than those who work in wealthy public schools and private schools. There is no incentive for a good teacher to work in a school that really needs a good teacher. 

 

            The movie makes a point that learning starts with a good teacher but does not answer the question of where a good teacher comes from. Of course it is important to get rid of teachers who can’t teach and those problems should be addressed. At the same time if we take the poor teachers out of the system, what are we replacing them with? Can even a good teacher be successful in a classroom with over thirty kids and limited materials? 

            Also, I found the lottery part of the film extraordinarily depressing. I was definitely rooting for certain kids and when their names or numbers were not called I hated watching their faces and the disappointment was terrible for them and their parents who had been hoping for them to be chosen. I guess it helps to think about how a charter school is not the answer to all problems, certain schools methods have been criticized, etc. However, it just seemed that the families pinned so many of their hopes on winning the lotteries. 

            I did not like how the film seemed to consider the charter schools the only way for the kids to have any possibility of graduating and getting into college. Maybe their high school had a higher than forty percent drop out rate, but that did not mean that these individual kids were never going to achieve their dreams, though I suppose the point was to portray them as representatives of all the kids going to so-called drop-out factories. I think I got most attached to the little girl who wanted to be a veterinarian and her family. I can totally relate since I wanted to be a veterinarian for the longest time. She seems determined and I hope all that negativity surrounding her potential at the public high school was not present in her actual life.

Week 2

I was not sure what to write about here seeing as I wrote about Kozol last time and I am beginning to tutor at the I Have a Dream Foundation on Thursday so I decided to relate some of my other coursework to this class, specifically the film Examined Life.

            This semester I am working on my economics thesis paper, which I plan to be an analysis of the market for collectable items. This market is difficult to define since just about any item can be collected. I have read some papers that describe the various things people collect ranging from empty beer cans to antique oarlocks. However, collectable items are different from things people collect in that collectable items are part of a set, presumably one outlined by the manufacturer but often retrospectively by antique enthusiasts. Russell Belk, author of Collecting in a Consumer Society, describes collecting as “the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or experiences”.

            This topic may seem random since I do not consider myself a collector. However, I was led into this topic as a result of my family’s obsession with the Beanie Baby fad in the late nineties. When I was considering ideas for my project, I kept coming back to the idea of fads and how something people fight over in stores becomes something I keep in the back of my closet now. I shudder to think how much money was spent on my enormous Beanie Baby collection and wonder what made us purchase all of them. Since only in hindsight is really possible to identify a fad, I went in another direction. Collectables are so useless really and yet people obsess over them and get extremely attached to their collections.

            In some ways, collectors are seeking connections with other collectors, describing their feelings at interacting with other collectors of the same good as being the only time they feel they are truly understood. In other ways collecting drives people away. Examples are described in which collector’s children feel they are in competition with the collection for their mother or father’s attention.

            What really reminded me of this class and the film Examined Life had to do with what Peter Singer spoke about while he was walking down a street in a major shopping district of New York City. He was speaking about ethics and he said that when we choose to spend money on one thing we are choosing not to spend money on another thing. In other words, by choosing to purchase one more cup of coffee, I am choosing not to spend my money giving someone in an underdeveloped country clean drinking water. He says that the choices we make are unethical.

            Collecting is just an extreme example of our habit of surrounding ourselves with things. In another article by Russell Belk titled, Collecting as Luxury Consumption: Effects on Households and Individuals, we are introduced to Marsha and Julian, both avid collectors. Among their collections they own over two hundred antique oarlocks, six hundred doilies, over a thousand astronomy books, forty-seven rocking chairs, and more than two thousand plates, cups, and saucers (To be fair, they are an extreme example, though Belk differentiates between collectors and hoarders in that they do not collect randomly, others may perceive what they own as having value). They realize they have a problem when they are unable to fit a recent acquisition to their furniture collection into their house. 

            The couple ends up paying somebody to come and get rid of all their stuff for them. When they return to their house after it has been emptied, they express a feeling of emptiness. Without their things, Julian comments about his home, “It is cold out there, inhospitable, alien. There’s nothing there, nothing contained in nothing. Nothing at all” (478). I believe this statement says something about how we see our lives without the protection of things.

Week 1

Martha Nussbaum in Examined Life spoke about the influence of the traditional approach of philosophers like Hobbes and Locke on popular culture. Their approach began with assumptions as to how people will act in the so-called “state of nature” meaning without governments to corral them into acceptable behavior.  In popular culture this approach has made it okay or provided an excuse for selfishness since everyone is out for themselves, tying into the puritanical idea that working hard will lead to material benefits. It follows that the poor have not worked hard enough and are to blame for their own situation, undeserving of public assistance.

However, what people think they earned in many cases is in fact the product of a history of privilege. This relates to what Jonathan Kozol writes in Shame of the Nation, that disadvantaged children are the product of disadvantaged adults and judging them by the same standardized tests by which we judge advantaged children is wrong. An eight year olds' poor work ethic is not truly to blame for poor performance on standardized tests, especially when compared to children of the same age given twice the number of years of education. 

What it comes down to is that people are unwilling to pay for another child’s education when it does not directly benefit their own child. Wealthier people may be uncomfortable with the unfairness of the current education system, but they are ultimately unwilling to provide more money to disadvantaged children when that money can go to their own children and they pressure the system to keep possible money drains, or poor children, out of their own children's classrooms. At the same time there is a fear that students starting behind others will take up more time, keeping more advanced students behind. Even within schools they split up classes into children better or worse at certain subjects, for example my elementary school split us into upper, middle, and lower level math and reading classes beginning in fourth grade. 

         

Kozol’s experiences in Shame of the Nation remind me of my high school experience in some ways. I went to school at one of the more high performing public school in Cabarrus County. Though nearly forty years old, the school had a history of performing highly on standardized tests, having a large number of advanced placement classes and a reputation of good teachers. Then in 2008 a new school opened in Harrisburg, closer to where I lived. My graduating class was allowed to finish at the older school since we were graduating that year. That year, many of my peers were discussing some of the gossip we had been hearing from the teachers, like that our year was the last good one, and the juniors coming up behind us were a lot less motivated. I noticed teachers retiring, for example both my AP Chemistry and my AP Statistics teachers retired that year. 

            I realized that the new school opening was splitting the school district socioeconomically, what Kozol calls re-segregating. The newer school was absorbing students from the more wealthy neighborhoods and my school was keeping the students from the less wealthy neighborhoods. Within a year of my graduation, my old high school was implementing extremely strict dress codes (no jeans and no wearing the color red), and many of my teachers had moved to other schools. My former civics and economics teacher who actually graduated from the same high school and had taught there for decades retired within two years of my graduation. Everyone I talk to about that is so surprised because of how often she spoke about loving the school. 

It seemed as though all the teachers with years of experience were finding jobs at better schools or retiring, which leads me to this article

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/27/teach-for-america-met-wit_n_1114995.html

From the article, “Many countries… send the strongest and most experienced teachers to work with the lowest performing students. The U.S. has done the reverse. There are nearly twice as many teachers with fewer than three years' experience in schools where students are predominantly low income and minority”.

This is an article I thought was interesting in relation to Kozol’s observation that many of the teachers he met in these schools were inexperienced and the schools had extremely high teacher turnover rates. I wondered if any of those he met may be involved with Teach for America though at least the one, Mr. Endicott from chapter three, was involved in a separate program which exchanged work in low-performing schools for education classes. 

I think the idea behind Teach for America is good, the view that new blood and new ideas will reinvigorate a lagging school (like in Freedom Writers!). However it also seems a little illogical to put the least experienced teachers in such a difficult situation. Most of the teachers Kozol spoke to were probably not involved in the program, which raises the question of why experienced teachers do not want to work in these schools - pretty obvious going off of Kozol’s discussion of comparative teacher salaries.

Kozol’s point is that there are many factors going into the failure of these schools beginning with a lack of funding and pre-K programs that put students at a disadvantage before even starting school. Segregating the schools into disadvantaged and advantaged or minority and Caucasian perpetuates this problem.

            Also a video of Jonathan Kozol speaking at Sonoma State University. He seems like a pretty funny guy.