ne classroom, we are told, has been sealed off "because of a gaping hole in the floor." In the band room, "chairs are positioned where acoustic tiles don't fall quite so often." In many places, "plaster and ceramic tile have peeled off" the walls, leaving the external brick wall of the school exposed. I am somewhat stunned to see a huge hole in the ceiling of the stairwell on the school's fourth floor. The plaster is gone; exposing rusted metal bars embedded in the outside wall. It will cost as much as $50 million to restore the school to an acceptable condition . . . (Kozol 99-101)
             The environments surrounding these schools are even worse. In East St. Louis, for example, among other problems with violence and pollution, lead levels in the soil can reach 10,000 parts per million (Kozol 11). All of the schools examined in East St. Louis, Chicago, New York City, Camden, Washington DC, and San Antonio are located in dangerous areas. Even taxi drivers refuse to go to these areas (Kozol 14). The problems in these schools and the surrounding locales have been recognized as negative by other people, another qualification for the definition of a social problem. To use another example from East St. Louis: The problems have been identified by, along with many others, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (Kozol 7), the University of Southern Illinois (Kozol 8), the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, including the reporter Safir Ahmed (Kozol 7-8, 10, 15-20, 22-23), local health officials (Kozol 10-11), lead-poison experts (Kozol 11), the Daughters of Charity (Kozol 11-12, 14), Green peace (Kozol 17), and the Illinois branch of the Environmental Protection Agency (Kozol 17). Kozol himself fits into this category.
             With the problem identified, the second criteria for meeting the definition of a social problem is that it must affect large numbers of people. Even when viewing the problem as only affecting the area in which it is ta...