Jonathan Kozol’s contributions to public education and role in exposing the educational inequities between the rich and poor have left big footprints in our nation’s public education narrative. Kozol, a 71-year-old Boston native, addressed a room full of educators, administrators and prospective educators at the Marriott Hotel in Coralville Tuesday. The event, co-sponsored by Prairie Lights Bookstore and The Iowa City Public Schools, was billed as a reading of Kozol’s new book, “Letters to a New Young Teacher,” but the real elephant in the room, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), could not be ignored.

“I have a theory about No Child Left Behind,” Kozol told more than 400 people who gathered to hear his reading. “I believe the right wing’s agenda underlying No Child Left Behind is not to help students on the bottom end of the spectrum, but to serve as more of a shaming ritual in the public spectrum to soften the ground for vouchers.”

Kozol, an award-winning author, has recently dedicated his time to public-education advocacy, in particular the NCLB Act, which is currently being considered for reauthorization by the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP). “It’s time for me to bring this battle back to Washington,” said Kozol, who has been lobbying all of the HELP committee members except one. Kozol, ironically, has had trouble getting access to the committee’s chair, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., his own state’s senator.

Frustrated, Kozol fasted this past summer to get Kennedy’s attention and protest NCLB. After Kozol had lost 30 pounds, his doctor put him on a limited fast, and, before he withered away, Kennedy agreed to meet with him in early November. Based on his meetings with other members, Kozol speculated why Kennedy, who co-authored NCLB, was reluctant to meet with him. “Kennedy thought No Child Left Behind would bring a lot more money into education, but what he didn’t realize is that the Bush administration would consistently underfund the legislation’s mandates year after year.”Although Kozol didn’t follow the traditional Prairie Lights reading format, he did thread the book’s content into his non-scripted lecture. His latest book, “Letters to a Young Teacher,” chronicles Kozol’s back-and-forth discourse with first-year teacher “Francesca,” who teaches inner-city first-graders in Boston. “This is the first cheerful book I’ve ever written,” Kozol told the crowd of educators. His other award-winning books; “Death at an Early Age,” “Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools,” “Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation,” and “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America,” expose the dark underbelly of the funding inequities facing inner-city schools — which serve a disproportionally larger rate of minority students

Kozol visited Francesca’s classroom on several occasions to do field research and to visit with the kids. Often, Kozol said Francesca put him on the spot by having him lead the teaching, or, as he puts it, “work as an unpaid substitute.” No stranger to teaching in inner-city Boston, Kozol’s teaching career began in Boston 30 years earlier, when his life was transformed by history during the civil rights period.

In 1964, Kozol had returned to the U.S. from Paris, where he had lived after attending Oxford University in England. He had planned on pursuing a doctorate degree in English literature at Harvard, but the news of the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi struck Kozol’s sense of justice. “That was the first time it dawned upon me that a terrible injustice had occurred in our nation,” Kozol said. “I couldn’t understand why it had taken so long for me to see what was happening to minority students in our schools. They are the outcasts of our ingenuity.”

Three years after the murders, Kozol landed his first teaching job in the Boston public school system, where he was fired during the final week of the school year. “On a whim, I decided to pick up a Langston Hughes book of poems at our local communist book store, I mean Harvard University book store, and I read one poem. The next day I was fired for `curriculum deviation.’”

Despite being fired, Kozol was hired by the top suburban school system in Boston, which doubled his previous salary while cutting his class size almost in half, from 35 to 19. “It was then I realized and learned how unjust our country can be to children – a gratuitous self-inflicted wound for a modern Democracy, if you will,” Kozol said. “We have the tools and means to provide every student with a top-tier education, and the fact that we don’t do this is as if we’re committing an act of social suicide. It’s not just that it denigrates people, but it’s something deeper than that and more pathological. We boast that we’re the greatest country, but we could also be the most decent and wisest nation in the world, but we are not.”

During his stint with Francesca and her students, Kozol gathered combined observational research to examine NCLB by putting a collective face on the legislation. While observing Francesca’s rapport develop with her students, Kozol witnessed a mystical chemistry evolve. “There’s nothing like that kind of chemistry in NCLB, which is more fear-based.”

“Francesca refused to teach a test-prep lesson, refused to drill her 6-year-olds for standardized exams, but rather, instilled her own sense of contagious jubilation and exhilaration into learning,” Kozol added. “In the end, most of her kids did very well on their exams, which suggests that the satisfaction found in the act of learning is always more effective, and certainly more enjoyable than learning from a feared exam.”

While traveling around the country and visiting schools, Kozol also witnessed another trend regarding the mission statement of schools located in urban school districts. “Children in these schools are being trained, specifically, to help achieve economic purposes. At a school in Columbus, Ohio, they had a mission statement posted on the wall of a first-grade classroom that read: `The mission of our school is to develop products that will sharpen our nation’s competitive edge in the competitive market place.”

Francesca’s response to this, when Kozol told her about it was: “Why would I give a damn about the global economy in my classroom? Better yet, why should first graders be worried about this? I refuse to steal away their childhood.”

Kozol highlighted a number of other consequences related to the fallout of NCLB, including the toll it has taken on new teachers entering the profession. While out recruiting teachers, Kozol observed that the quality of teachers entering the profession today is far superior to what he witnessed during the `60s. “Francesca is one of these people; however, 50 percent of her peers quit within the first three years of teaching,” Kozol said. “And, invariably, the number one reason these teachers quit is attributed to the current mania of testing that’s being forced upon them by the federal law of NCLB.”

Julie Englander, the host of Prairie Lights Live, asked Kozol why teachers are reluctant to express their feeling about the problems that exist in the public school system. Kozol argued that, traditionally, teachers have been trained that a professional doesn’t engage in anything provocative or overtly adversarial. “Another reason I think teachers are often silent right now is because this right-wing juggernaut has put everyone on the defensive, so they’re scrambling to pump out these test scores,” Kozol added. “Teachers are the best witnesses as to what happens in the classroom, not the think tanks or bureaucrats who run around pushing their testing agenda. Teachers need a national network where their voices can be heard.”

Putting his words to action, Kozol helped create “Education Action,” an online network for teachers, parents, students and community members who want to advocate for justice in the public schools and start holding politicians accountable. “There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that would hold a little third-grade girl accountable for her performance in a standardized exam, but does not hold the president and Congress accountable,” Kozol said. Education Action’s web site has a number of suggestions for revising NCLB.

Kozol, who says he has been under constant fire by members of the political right wing, refuses to give any ground when it comes to standing up for restoring a more just and equitable education system. “I don’t care what they do to me now. I’m too old to bite my tongue,” he said. “No matter who I am and no matter what the price is to pay, I intend to keep on fighting in this struggle.”

Jonathan Kozol signs books after the event