American educator and writer; for more than fifty years the most persistent American documentary witness to the condition of children in poor and segregated public schools, and the author of a long series of books — from Death at an Early Age (1967) through Savage Inequalities (1991) to The Shame of the Nation (2005) — that have made school-funding inequality and urban school segregation visible to a general American readership as a continuing rather than a historical problem.
Kozol was born in Boston in 1936, took his undergraduate degree at Harvard, spent time on a Rhodes Scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and began teaching in 1964 as a substitute in the Boston Public Schools, assigned to a segregated Black fourth-grade classroom in Roxbury. Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (1967), his account of that year — which ended with his firing for reading a Langston Hughes poem not on the approved curriculum — won the 1968 National Book Award and established the template he has followed since: close, child-level reporting, in the classrooms and the homes, returned to over years.
Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (1991) is the book for which he is best known. Written after two years of travel to public schools in East St. Louis, Chicago's South Side, New York City, Camden, San Antonio, and Washington DC, it documents, concretely, the per-pupil spending differentials — sometimes three- or four-to-one — between poor urban and affluent suburban school districts under American property-tax funding structures, and the material consequences for the children inside the poor buildings: raw sewage in school corridors, science labs with no water, libraries with no books, teachers buying their own paper. The book was a bestseller and is the standard reference text on American school-funding inequality; it has been cited in state supreme-court school-finance decisions.
The later books extend the argument. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (1995) is a close portrait of Mott Haven in the South Bronx, at the time the poorest congressional district in the United States; Ordinary Resurrections (2000) returns to the same children years later. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (2005) documents that by the early 2000s American public schools had become more racially segregated than at any point since the 1960s Civil Rights decisions. Letters to a Young Teacher (2007) is the shorter book he puts in the hands of new teachers. Fire in the Ashes (2012) follows the children from Amazing Grace into their adulthoods.
Kozol's method — long-form reporting in close relationship with his subjects over decades, with direct advocacy folded into the writing — has few contemporary American parallels; Matthew Desmond's work on eviction is one, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed tradition another. His politics are those of the Catholic Worker / civil-rights / Freirean tradition: a radical position on equal funding, integrated schools, and against standardized testing, high-stakes accountability, and charter-school expansion as policy responses that leave the underlying inequality untouched.