Jonathan Kozol's visit to Portland, Oregon, in April 2005 included a dialogue with 55 urban middle and high school students about inequities in American schools. Students left this conversation with a stronger sense of the systemic impediments to equal education. They also felt that their voice had been heard on a topic of national import. This essay suggests that Kozol provided students with a model of patient civic engagement and that teachers who use Kozol's work should build on this framework.

Student voice is deeply important. However, by the time students reach secondary school, many already are alienated not only from their role as students, but also as active participants in our democracy. Teachers need to awaken students' sense of themselves as active participants in their own learning and, ultimately, in the decisionmaking processes at all levels of our society (Brown, Higgins, and Paulsen 2003).

Social Foundations of Education is one course that can help teachers understand the forces that render many students' voices ineffective. This university course examines these essential questions: What is education for? Who does education empower? For whom is it debilitating? How can we build more just and equitable schools? Jonathan Kozol has been a harbinger of possibility in their quest for social justice. His work has challenged them and their students to critique "what is" and to build "what could be."

In April 2005, Kozol visited a small urban university in Portland, Oregon, to deliver a public lecture sponsored by the school's Center for Ethics and Culture. As is often the case with such engagements, Kozol was in demand, both on campus and among community leaders. Because Kozol loves engaging with young people, he was asked to speak with local youth. Thus began efforts to involve 55 middle and high school students from schools located in high-poverty, racially mixed neighborhoods in a dialogue with Kozol. This paper tells the story of this remarkable conversation, with a focus on the effects it had on the students' perceptions of education in the United States, and of their abilities to participate in its transformation.

Participants and Purposes

Drawn from a public high school and three middle schools (two public and one private), the students who met with Kozol had never known an education without want. All lived in neighborhoods with few financial and physical resources. They were part of the first generation of Oregonians whose education had taken place after a 1990 property tax limitation initiative forced the vast majority of public school funding to come from state coffers. From their earliest days, all of these students have witnessed contentious and highly public debates within the state legislature-discussions that have had few positive outcomes for children. Children who have attended Portland public schools have experienced increased class sizes, loss of librarians and music and art teachers, and schoolrooms, hallways, and bathrooms that are cleaned irregularly. Since the mid-1990s, they have witnessed everything from a 30,000-person walk-a-thon for education to the possibility of a five-week early closing of schools, averted only when teachers gave up ten days of salary and citizens approved a three-year local income tax (Bailey 2005).

The dismal events of the past 16 years have crippled morale in the three public schools represented in the Kozol conversation, and the mood may plunge even lower (Ambrosio 2004). Each of the schools is on or near the NCLB "failing" list and, with local income tax and other important funding sources set to expire soon, these students learned of further cuts in their buildings just days before meeting with Kozol.

This bleak story also affected the private school students who participated in the conversation. All were African-American or Latino youth from neighborhoods with struggling schools. Many had attended public schools at one time, all had friends attending them and, most importantly, all had firsthand knowledge of the battle for resources in poor communities and their institutions. Their school, with its Catholic affiliation, had its own funding demons with which to wrestle, most notably a lack of funds to satisfy financial claims on the bankrupt Portland archdiocese.

Surveys of students (e.g., Kids First 2003; Boston Plan for Excellence 2004; Goddard, Hoy, and Hoy 2004; Unidos and Unidos 2004) in similar situations to those who participated in this conversation indicated that students are painfully aware of poor facilities, lack of resources, and discrimination in their schools, but that they rarely associate these problems with systemic patterns of racism and segregation. These urban students had ideas about ways to improve individual schools, but their recommendations typically focused on changing the behaviors of teachers, administrators, and students rather than on more widespread causes of injustice. For example, many high school students in the Oakland, California, public schools identified nonfunctional bathrooms as an important school problem, and personal efforts to beautify and maintain their schools as the solution (Kids First 2003). Surveys also suggested that, despite their many ideas, students in urban schools often had little faith in their own ability to bring about change. They frequently cited a lack of respect and attentiveness from adults in schools and a sense that the challenging coursework necessary for them to be successful in college or later life is seldom, if ever, available.