Jonathan Kozol sees the lights in inner-city children's eyes.

He senses gentleness, a caring, renewable spirit that in many of them fades into disillusionment with time.

If only more people, especially education's policymakers, could see what he sees, he says.

If they knew the children he has known and spent the days he's spent in the nation's classrooms and after-school programs, they'd grieve over the potential lost and going to waste in America's city schools.

They'd know firsthand if their experiments in education and social welfare were working. They'd realize that priority should be placed on initiatives that keep the lights shining, that keep the little ones dreaming despite the dimming effects of poverty, crime and struggling parents.

Since Mr. Kozol wrote his first book, Death at an Early Age, published in 1967, this Harvard-educated author has dragged the nation's consciousness into poor inner-city schools and revealed the inadequacies and inequalities of urban education.

Still an activist

Even now, as the nation's politics continue to swing to the right, he remains a popular speaker. His books still grab spots on bestseller lists and are standard texts at universities.

On Sunday he'll keynote The Show of Hope Exhibit, a tribute to Cincinnati's diversity in music and art, at the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza Hotel downtown. The Manuel D. and Rhoda Mayerson Foundation sponsors the free event, which requires reservations.

Mr. Kozol - a soft-spoken, college-professor type - spends most days with children in New York and Boston, but he visits and keeps tabs on schools throughout the country. In Ohio he plans several visits this year, including a stopover Monday in Over-the-Rhine at WCET-TV (Channel 48).

Lately, he's been aiming both barrels at the national obsession with standardized testing, a cornerstone in the Leave No Child Behind legislation, designed to measure school and student performance.

He says setting and enforcing academic standards without first expending resources to educate disadvantaged youngsters hurts more than it helps.

The federal government, he says, kicks in only 3 percent of the cost of all public education. It should direct more dollars to proven programs like Head Start, all-day kindergarten and early education before enforcing test-based standards on under-educated fourth-graders.

The tests aren't supposed to discourage students, but they do, he says. The tests aren't supposed to dissuade dedicated and idealistic teachers from serving in inner-city schools, but that's happening.

Principals aren't supposed to be drill sergeants, standing with stopwatches ready as classes prepare for tests with sample questions and test-based curricula, but that's happening too, he says.

Ohio is like most states - it fires or reassigns teachers and administrators at schools that score too low.

Education boot camps

Schools have become boot camps, Mr. Kozol says. For whole days and weeks, children don't study literature, history, science or art - which could help them learn to think and analyze. Instead, he says, kids are taught to memorize - and practice taking tests.

One school Mr. Kozol visits often in the South Bronx is different, he says. There the principal, a Hispanic woman, refuses to be intimidated by the tests and won't restrict the school's curricula. Ironically, her students score high on the tests.

"I'm not running a boot camp for black and Latino babies," she told Mr. Kozol. "I refuse to say I'm training these children for jobs. I'm educating them for all the riches in the world."

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E-mail damos@enquirer.com or phone 768-8395.