If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murdererbad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

I am not an education policy wonk: I’m 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 shouldn’t 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? It’s 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 don’t 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, it’s the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administration’s face when a teacher is falling down on the job. Everyone, all in. (By the way: Banning private schools isn’t 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.

Via: The Slate

Continue Reading....

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TARGETS PRIVATE SCHOOLS

This article was originally published by the Heartland Institute.

Several commentators have justly piled on the Obama administration’s craven legal challenge to a Louisiana voucher program that offers a way out of rotten schools for predominantly black, poor children. The U.S. Department of Justice’s charge? Vouchers may change, by minuscule percentages, the ratio of black to white children at some schools. Therefore, it’s better to keep all kids in failing schools. Cato’s Andrew Coulson wryly notes this effectively tells black parents their choices hurt black people.

Furthermore, as The Wall Street Journal writes, “The evidence from around the country is that vouchers enhance racial integration. Public school attendance is mainly determined by geography, so segregated neighborhoods produce segregated schools.”

There’s more at work here, however. The Obama administration’s Louisiana lawsuit is part of a habit of seeking to control states and private institutions. This spring, for example, the DOJ also demanded that Wisconsin impose more regulations on and inspections of private voucher schools, alleging this was necessary to alleviate discrimination against special-needs students although literally no evidence of this exists. And, of course, although no federal budget has existed since the president took office, each time it surfaces he attempts to use it to cancel vouchers for more poor, predominantly black students in Washington, DC.

Consider also the effects of the president’s signature initiative, Obamacare, on private schools, which are largely religious. They’re worried. Depending on how legal challenges play out, the health care law may force religious schools to hire employees whose morality conflicts with their mission, and to pay for medical procedures that violate their First Amendment freedom of conscience. Imagine a Catholic school being forced to hire a Buddhist religion teacher, or a Mormon school being forced to pay for abortions.

It is increasingly clear that, voucher regulations or no voucher regulations, private schools offer no safe place to tuck children as long as the federal government persists in overstepping the bounds of law and rationality to impose autocrats’ wills on everyone.

Via: Human Events

Continue Reading....