A manifesto. You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer badâbut bad like ruining-one-of-our-nationâs-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-whatâs-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad. I am not an education policy wonk: Iâm just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldnât be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.) So, how would this work exactly? Itâs simple! Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you donât send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better. And parents have a lot of power. In many underresourced schools, itâs the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administrationâs face when a teacher is falling down on the job. Everyone, all in. (By the way: Banning private schools isnât the answer. We need a moral adjustment, not a legislative one.) There are a lot of reasons why bad people send their kids to private school. Yes, some do it for prestige or out of loyalty to a long-standing family tradition or because they want their children to eventually work at Slate. But many others go private for religious reasons, or because their kids have behavioral or learning issues, or simply because the public school in their district is not so hot. None of these are compelling reasons. Or, rather, the compelling ones (behavioral or learning issues, wanting a not-subpar school for your child) are exactly why we should all opt in, not out. More...
You got to give him a pass on this front with security issues and all. Just saying. Now, for a hypocrite and bad, bad person, I present...Matt Damon, vocal supporter of the public school system. The Bourne Hypocrisy
ONLY if all former US presidents sent their young children to private schools for security reasons. THEN I'll give him a pass.
Do you think the Obama kids go out in public...say, to the mall without a security detail? Please enlighten me as to why the Secret Service could not go into a public school? I agree with Lucrum - this is total hypocrisy!
LOL. I'd bet heavy money that god damn near every limousine liberal in this f'n country has went to, and now sends their kids to private schools.
I'm not a mathematician or anything, but they say the government spends about $50 billion per year on public education (I have no idea the real numbers, but bear with me) Now lets say suddenly 10% of all kids get pulled out by their parents and put in private school on the parents own dime. So don't you now have $50 billion dollars going to towards less kids which means more student/teacher interaction, and more funding per child in the public school system?