Cuomo is a major disappointment for a progressive in NYS.

Noted author 'shocked' by Cuomo's comments (Click on this headline to read more)

Friends' views differ on governor's prescription for failing schools

By Rick Karlin Published 9:59 pm, Thursday, November 7, 2013

Author Jonathan Kozol addresses those gathered at a conference put on by the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy on Thursday, Nov. 7, 2013 in Albany, NY.
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Jonathan Kozol, one of the nation's most acclaimed writers on the subject of poverty, said that while he considers Andrew Cuomo a friend he was "utterly shocked" by the governor's recent comments that schools exhibiting poor academic performance should face a "death penalty."

"You improve a good school by nurturing good teachers and pouring in resources," Kozol told a rapt audience Thursday at the SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering for a conference sponsored by the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy.

[...]

Kozol, whose books include "Savage Inequalities" and "Death at an Early Age," didn't shy away from his own blunt commentary — despite suffering the after-effects of what he described as a complicated cataract operation and enduring a trip on a seven-passenger plane from his home base in Boston.

Two-year-olds from wealthy families in New York City, he said, attend $28,000-per-year pre-school programs while their impoverished counterparts in the Bronx suffer from rotting teeth due to a lack of dental care. Some poor kids also reside in households where the phone is cut off on a regular basis because their parents can't pay the bill.

Schools in places such as Poughkeepsie, the South Bronx, parts of Chicago and East Los Angeles are composed almost entirely of black or Hispanic students, part of what Kozol said is a system of de facto educational apartheid.