Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools was published by Crown Publishers in 1991, and it remains the most devastating indictment of educational funding inequality in American literature. Kozol visits schools in six cities — East St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Camden, Washington D.C., and San Antonio — comparing the schools available to poor (predominantly Black and Latino) children with those available to wealthy (predominantly white) children in adjacent suburbs.
The contrasts are not subtle: in East St. Louis, schools lack basic textbooks and share buildings with sewage treatment plants; in the adjacent suburban districts, schools have swimming pools, planetariums, and computer labs. In the South Bronx, elementary school classes meet in hallways and closets; across the Harlem River in Riverdale, class sizes are fifteen and every child has a computer. The funding disparity — often 3:1 or 4:1 between rich and poor districts in the same metropolitan area — is built into the property-tax system that funds American schools: rich neighborhoods generate rich schools, poor neighborhoods generate poor schools, and the gap widens with every year.
Kozol’s method is journalistic rather than academic: he visits classrooms, talks to children, quotes teachers and principals, and lets the reality speak. The book’s power lies in the juxtaposition — in placing the daily experience of a child in Camden beside the daily experience of a child in Princeton, and asking America to justify the difference.
Collecting Savage Inequalities
First edition (Crown Publishers, New York, 1991): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Signed first edition: $35–$80
- Without jacket: $5–$12