Guest blogger Susan Klonsky's response to Wendy Kopp
Wendy Kopp derides Kozol's Fire In the Ashes for not being the book she wanted him to write, and for not "being more current" nor embracing the world view that she champions. She implies that Kozol's exposures of "savage inequalities" embedded throughout Fire in the Ashes are outdated due mainly to the great progress being made by contemporary school reformers like herself and New York Mayor Bloomberg. Kopp characterizes Kozol's book as "misleading" and "pessimistic" because it does not hail the Bloomberg education agenda in New York Public Schools, an agenda of school closings, privatization, and union-busting.
Little of Kozol's book is actually about schools at all. Rather, it is a study in the long-