slate | You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—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.
I believe in public education, but my district school really isn’t good! you might say. I understand. You want the best for your child, but your child doesn’t need it.
If you can afford private school (even if affording means scrimping and
saving, or taking out loans), chances are that your spawn will be
perfectly fine at a crappy public school. She will have support at home
(that’s you!) and all the advantages that go along with being a person
whose family can pay for and cares about superior education—the exact
kind of family that can help your crappy public school become less
crappy. She may not learn as much or be as challenged, but take a deep
breath and live with that. Oh, but she’s gifted? Well, then, she’ll really be fine. Fist tap Dale.
