Savage Inequalities Revisited: Race & Inequality in US Schools

In 1991, Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities forced America to confront a painful truth: our public schools, far from being the “great equalizer,” were engines of entrenched, racialized poverty and privilege. Kozol’s stories—of East St. Louis schools drowning in sewage, of children learning in hallways for lack of space—were not just reporting, but a moral reckoning with a nation that had broken its promise of equal opportunity.

More than three decades later, in 2025, the landscape is both hauntingly familiar and, in crucial ways, even more perilous. The chasms Kozol exposed remain, but a new, insidious force seeks not just to ignore, but to erase the very truth of inequality—even as previous efforts to address that inequality often missed its deeper structural roots. This is no longer neglect—it is a deliberate assault on justice, and silence is complicity.

The Unrelenting Grip of Educational Apartheid

Kozol’s later works, The Shame of the Nation (2005) and An End to Inequality (2024), trace the resurgence of what he called “apartheid schooling.” Recent federal data confirm his fears: 60% of Black and Latino students now attend schools where over 75% of their peers are minorities—a segregation level rivaling the early 1990s (NCES, 2024)

Funding gaps between high-poverty and low-poverty districts have widened to $1,500 per student, leaving urban schools with outdated books, no heat, and overcrowded classrooms (Kozol, 2024)

In 2024, Kozol described a Bronx school where students shared tattered textbooks while, just a few miles away, their affluent peers enjoyed iPads and gleaming science labs (Kozol, 2024)

The new Civil Rights Data Collection reveals the persisting breadth of this divide: schools with high Black and Latino enrollment are far less likely to offer advanced courses—only 35% provide calculus, compared to 54% of whiter schools (EdWeek, 2025; CRDC, 2021–22). The pipeline narrows further in advanced placement courses: Black students, despite being 15% of high schoolers, represent only 9% of AP computer science students, 7% in AP science, and 6% in AP math (EdWeek, 2025)These disparities have remained stubbornly persistent over the past decade.

The discipline gap—suspensions, expulsions, even in preschool—remains as wide as ever, with Black boys especially targeted at every stage of schooling (EdWeek, 2025)

Of the approximately 537,700 students nationwide who attend public schools where fewer than half of the teachers are fully certified, 68% are Black or Latino (EdWeek, 2025; CRDC 2021–22)

These are not just numbers. In Chicago, as Eve Ewing chronicled in Ghosts in the Schoolyard, the closure of public schools in Black neighborhoods was not just a policy—it was an act of “institutional mourning,” a slow erasure of community memory and hope (Ewing, 2018)

Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America (2023) reminds us that these patterns are not accidental but the result of deliberate policy choices, resource hoarding, and a refusal to confront the intersecting realities of race and class in American inequality (Desmond, 2023)

A New Phase: Suppression and Retrenchment

The 2020s mark a chilling shift. Where Kozol once decried neglect, we now face a coordinated campaign to silence the very fight for equality. The Trump administration’s Project 2025, rolled out through a barrage of executive orders, weaponizes civil rights law to dismantle any institutional attempt to address racial inequality—however flawed or incomplete some of those efforts may have been. Over 60 universities, including Columbia, now face federal investigations for “race-based preferences”—claims that diversity programs unfairly disadvantage white or Asian students (NYT, 2025)

In March 2025, after the Trump administration suspended $400 million in federal funding and demanded that Columbia place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department (MESAAS) under academic receivership, the university instead fired the department’s head and appointed an outsider, Miguel Urquiola, as senior vice provost to conduct a sweeping review of regional studies, starting with the Middle East. While Columbia stopped short of formal receivership, these changes effectively increased administrative oversight and left faculty and students in a state of fear and confusion, with the department still under outside review and faculty lawsuits pending (The Intercept, April 16, 2025 (The Intercept, 2025; NYT, 2025)

As of June 2025, the department remains under outside review, with faculty lawsuits pending. Students and faculty describe whiplash, fear, and confusion. “This is an attack on scholarship, dissent, and critical thinking,” said a MESAAS graduate student (The Intercept, 2025). Conferences have moved online, “more like an underground secret meeting than a public rally” (The Intercept, 2025)

The message is clear: academic freedom is no longer sacrosanct, and the federal government is willing to use its financial power to enforce ideological conformity.

Curriculum Censorship: The DoDEA Book Ban

Perhaps the most sweeping example of this new censorship comes from the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) schools. In January 2025, President Trump signed executive orders banning “gender ideology” and “divisive concepts” from federally funded K-12 education (ACLU-KY, 2025)

The result? Over 500 books—including To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, The New Jim Crow, and Julián Is a Mermaid—have been “quarantined” or removed (Book Riot, 2025). Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and Pride Month celebrations have been canceled. Teachers have been ordered to strip classrooms of any reference to race, gender, or American history deemed “radical.” Even yearbooks are policed for “support for social transition” (Book Riot, 2025)

The ACLU is now suing on behalf of military families, arguing these bans violate students’ First Amendment rights and set a chilling precedent for all American schools (ACLU-KY, 2025)

A military parent put it bluntly: “We make sacrifices so my husband can defend the Constitution and the rights and freedoms of all Americans. If our own rights and the rights of our children are at risk, we have a responsibility to speak out” (Book Riot, 2025). Students themselves have staged walkouts and protests, risking discipline to defend their right to learn—including a walkout in South Korea where students folded the American flag and one dressed as the Statue of Liberty (Book Riot, 2025)

Federal Retrenchment and the Assault on Opportunity

The assault on educational opportunity does not stop at censorship. The Trump administration’s proposed 15% cut to the Education Department’s budget targets Title I, Head Start, and special education—lifelines for poor and minority students (NPR, 2025; NEA, 2025)

AmeriCorps, which funded thousands of after-school and tutoring programs for low-income children, has been gutted. In Georgia, a beloved dropout prevention program lost its tutors overnight. In Brooklyn, the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park—a nonprofit serving 800 children—lost over $950,000 in AmeriCorps funding, jeopardizing daily care, after-school programs, and college grants for neighborhood youth (Gothamist, 2025)

These cuts hit hardest in communities already struggling with poverty and underfunded schools, amplifying the very inequalities Kozol decried more than thirty years ago.

The Data: Inequality by Design

The new Civil Rights Data Collection makes it impossible to pretend these are isolated incidents. The numbers tell a story of systematic exclusion: only 48% of high schools offered calculus in 2021–22, and just half offered computer science (EdWeek, 2025)

In predominantly Black and Latino schools, those numbers drop precipitously—to 35% for calculus and 42% for computer science (EdWeek, 2025). Nearly one in five high schools has no counselor; Black and Native American students are 1.3 times more likely than whites to attend a school with a security guard but no counselor (EdWeek, 2025)

Imagine a Black student in a Detroit school in 2025, denied calculus while her suburban peers code on laptops—a gap the CRDC quantifies, but only lived experience can fully reveal.

A new Stanford/USC study, released on the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board, finds that racial and economic segregation among schools has grown steadily in large districts over the past three decades—driven not by demographic change, but by policy choices favoring “school choice” over integration. Segregation between white and Black students has increased by 64% since 1988 in the 100 largest districts, and segregation by economic status has increased by about 50% since 1991 (USC/Stanford, 2025)

Weaponizing Civil Rights Law

Perhaps the most perverse twist of the current era is the weaponization of civil rights law itself. The Trump administration has reinterpreted Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to claim that diversity initiatives and race-conscious curricula constitute “reverse racism” against whites and Asians. Universities are under investigation, funding is threatened or withdrawn, and the very legal architecture designed to dismantle segregation is now being used to enforce a “colorblind” agenda that denies the intersecting realities of race and class disadvantage (NYT, 2025)

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From Neglect to Erasure

Whereas Kozol’s era could be described as one of neglect or denial, today’s political climate is marked by active erasure. The “culture wars” are not a sideshow; they are the main event, serving to distract from—and in many cases, worsen—the institutional disadvantages facing poor and minority students. The very act of naming inequality is now a political risk. Kozol’s enduring insight was that educational inequality reflected broader patterns of economic and social disadvantage—patterns that persist regardless of which particular remedies are attempted or abandoned.

Resistance and the Fight for Truth

Yet, as in Kozol’s time, there is resistance. Students, parents, and educators are suing, protesting, and organizing. Military families are challenging the DoDEA bans in court (ACLU-KY, 2025)

Faculty at Columbia and Harvard have spoken out, even as administrations capitulate (The Intercept, 2025). In South Korea, DoDEA students staged walkouts, flag-folding ceremonies, and protests dressed as the Statue of Liberty (Book Riot, 2025). In Texas, teachers have defied book bans by hosting underground reading groups, risking their jobs to preserve access to The New Jim Crow and other banned works (Book Riot, 2025)

In Chicago, parents rallied in April 2025 to save a South Side school, proving the spirit of resistance lives.

These acts of defiance are reminders that the struggle for educational equality is also a struggle for the right to tell the truth—about both the persistence of racial disadvantage and the economic structures that sustain it.

Conclusion: The Kozolian Imperative

If we apply Kozol’s framework to 2025, the verdict is grim: the "savage inequalities" of American education have not disappeared—they have adapted, deepened, and, in some ways, become more insidious. The challenge now is not only to document the persistence of injustice, but to resist its erasure from public consciousness. As we revisit Kozol’s legacy, we must confront the reality that the struggle for educational equity is not just about funding or policy, but about the right to bear witness—to insist that honest analysis of structural inequality in all its forms remains at the center of our national life.

In 2025, time is running out. Every silenced book, every shuttered school, is a theft of a child’s future. Share a story, join a protest, demand accountability—because every child deserves a school that nurtures their dreams, not one that erases their history.

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Sources

1. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (Crown, 1991); An End to Inequality (The New Press, 2024).

2. The Intercept, “Inside Columbia’s Betrayal of Its Middle Eastern Studies Department,” April 16, 2025.

3. Book Riot, “How The ACLU Is Responding to Book Bans in US Military Schools,” June 6, 2025.

4. Education Week, “What the Latest Civil Rights Data Show About Racial Disparities in Schools,” January 16, 2025.

5. Eve L. Ewing, Ghosts in the Schoolyard (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

6. Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America (Crown, 2023).

7. U.S. Department of Education, Civil Rights Data Collection, 2021–22.

8. New York Times, “Why Trump’s Ultimatum to Columbia Could Upend Higher Education,” March 20, 2025.

9. ACLU of Kentucky, “Defending the First Amendment,” May 8, 2025.

10. National Center for Education Statistics, 2024.

11. National Education Association, “Four Ways Trump’s Budget Proposal Slashes Public School Funding,” May 7, 2025.

12. USC/Stanford, “New Segregation Index Shows U.S. Schools Remain Highly Segregated,” May 17, 2022; American Sociological Review, “School Segregation is Widening Racial Achievement Gaps,” January 7, 2025.

13. NPR, “Trump’s Budget Calls for 15% Education Department Cut,” June 2, 2025.

    14.14. Gothamist, “Sunset Park after-school program upended by Trump’s AmeriCorps cuts,” May 27, 2025