In the mid-1960s, Jonathan Kozol, a public elementary school teacher, published Death at an Early Age, a riveting account of teaching 4th grade in Boston. He documented in detail the banal humiliations, mistreatment, and injustices endured by poor Black students in Northern schools. The book won a national book award and helped to galvanize the movement for full human and civil rights as it moved into the cities of the North. Kozol later marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and became widely recognized as a pivotal figure in the struggle for equity in education. In his book, Savage Inequalities, Kozol illustrates the hypocrisy in all claims of equal opportunity and access by comparing schools for the privileged with schools for the marginalized and the disadvantaged.

Kozol ...