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Jonathan Kozol (born September 5 , 1936 in Boston, Massachusetts ) is a non-fiction writer, educator, and activist, best known for his books on Public Education in the United States . Kozol graduated from Harvard University Summa Cum Laude in 1958 with a degree in English Literature and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford . He did not, however, complete his Rhodes, deciding instead to go to Paris to write a novel. He spent four years there writing his only published work of fiction, '' The Fume Of Poppies '', and getting to know the likes of William Styron . It was upon his return that he began to tutor children in Roxbury, MA , and soon became a teacher in the Boston Public Schools. He was fired for teaching a Langston Hughes poem, as described in '' Death At An Early Age '', and then became deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement. After being fired from BPS he was offered a job to teach for Newton Public Schools, the school district that he had attended as a child, and taught there for several years before becoming more deeply involved in social justice work and dedicating more time to writing. Kozol has since held two Guggenheim Fellowships , has twice been a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation , and has also received fellowships from the Field and Ford Foundations. Kozol also has worked in the field of Social Psychology . Kozol is currently on the Editorial Board of Greater Good Magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University Of California, Berkeley . Kozol's contributions include the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships. WRITING CAREER '' Death At An Early Age '', his first non-fiction book is a description of his first year as a teacher in the Boston Public Schools. It was published in 1967 and received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. It has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe . Among the other books by Kozol are ''Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America'', which received the '', which won the New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. His 1995 book, '''', described his visits to the South Bronx of New York , the poorest congressional district in the United States. It received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr. . He published ''Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope'' in 2000. His most recent book is ''The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America'', which was released September 13, 2005. Kozol documents the continuing and often worsening segregation in public schools in the United States, and the increasing influence of neoconservative ideology on the way children, particularly children of color and poor children of urban areas, are educated. Kozol is still active in advocating for integrated public education in the United States and is an outspoken critic of the voucher movement. He continues to condemn the inequalities of education and speaks unrelentingly of the apparently worsening segregation of black and Hispanic children from white children in the segregated public schools of almost every major city of the nation. Kozol's ethical argument relies heavily on comparisons between rich and poor school districts. In particular, he analyzes the amount of money spent per child. He finds that in school districts whose taxpayers and property-owners are relatively wealthy, the per-child annual spending is much higher (for example, over $20,000 per year per child in one district) than in school districts where poor people live (for example, $11,000 per year per child in one district) {Link without Title} . He asks rhetorically whether it is right that the place of one's birth should determine the quality of one's education. NON-PROFIT Kozol has founded and is running a non-profit called Education Action! The group is dedicated to grassroots organizing of teachers across the country who wish to push back against NCLB and the most recent Supreme Court decisions, and to help create a single, excellent, unified system of American public schools. WORKS
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