Well, it’s official: I’m a bad person. So says Slate columnist Allison Benedikt, who last week declared that anyone who sends his or her children to a private school is “morally bankrupt.”
She apparently speaks for a lot of people; the column has a gazillion Facebook shares as well as more than 5,000 comments on the Slate site alone.
Benedikt argues that if all of us professional, educated, involved parents sent our kids to public schools, the public schools would be much better.
Much better? Give me a break; she’s ignoring the central problem with public schools: the lack of accountability.
Fine, my involvement might marginally improve a school — she says that the PTA would raise more cash for extra programs with wealthier parents. But money’s not the main issue.
At a recent dinner in one of the highest property-tax towns in New York (and probably the whole country), two parents told me how their son’s kindergarten teacher started having “emotional problems” a month into the year.
She was in and out of school for the next five months. But rather than hire a permanent replacement, the district had to bring in one sub after another — because of “union rules,” the parents were told. They say their son learned almost nothing during the year. Even a $40,000-a-year tax payment doesn’t buy accountability.
There’s also the “diversity” argument. Benedikt writes, “As rotten as my school’s English, history, science, social studies, math, art, music and language programs were, going to school with poor kids and rich kids, black kids and brown kids, smart kids and not-so-smart ones, kids with superconservative Christian parents and other upper-middle-class Jews like me was its own education and life preparation.”
So we need to keep everyone in public schools for the sake of creating a diverse environment, even if it means their actual education will be worse? Sadly, she’s far from alone in thinking that. It seems to be the theory behind the Justice Department’s recent civil-rights suit to block Louisiana’s successful voucher program. Justice argues that the program violates federal desegregation orders.
In other words, we have to keep more blacks in failing schools to meet some abstract racial-balance rules.
This is civil rights?
But the real problem here is the assumption that improving the educational options for the less-advantaged means sacrificing the education of other children, apparently.
Not true. Studies have shown that recipients of private scholarships and public vouchers to private schools are more likely to graduate than their public-school peers. They also score higher on various academic measures.
For instance, 60,000 Florida kids now receive money from a corporate tax credit to attend private schools. Mostly racial minorities, they come from families where the average income is less than $24,000 a year. And yet their test scores are now at the same level as the national average.
Which means those private schools are closing both the racial and economic achievement gaps.
Earlier this month, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal lawsuit against Alabama for launching a similar program. The plaintiffs claim that the state’s new tax-credit-funded scholarships violate the Constitution’s equal-protection clause.
As the Associated Press reported, “Law Center President Richard Cohen said the new Alabama Accountability Act will take millions away from public schools and will make the failing schools worse than they are now.” The suit was filed on behalf of eight students who say that they can’t afford transportation to private schools even if they’re offered a scholarship for the tuition.
So the claim is, basically, that unless the scholarship program can get every last student out of a failing school, it should leave all of them behind.
Personally, I’d rather give poor parents the same advantages that my kids have — to be able to choose a good school that’s right for their children.
But what do I know? I’m a bad person.