School-Choice Hypocrites
‘Every parent has to decide what’s best for their child,” state Sen. Robert Jackson (D-Manhattan/Bronx) told a charter-school parent at a hearing this month. “If that’s what you decided, that’s what you decided.” Nice — except that he doesn’t want lower-income parents to have much choice about it, certainly not the amount of choice he and his wife were fortunate enough to have when they opted to send their daughter to the pricey Dwight School on the Upper West Side.
Johnson, a longtime United Federation of Teachers lackey, is one of several anti-charter state lawmakers who’ve benefited, personally or via their kids, from the choice of something other than a standard publicschool education.
His Senate colleague Jabari Brisport (D-B’klyn), another loud charter opponent, graduated high school from Poly Prep Country Day School (where tuition ranges above $50k a year) in 2005. He’s a democratic socialist, yet he doesn’t think poor people should have choices like those he benefited from?
Capital region Democratic Assemblyman Phil Steck, also anti-charter, sent his daughter to the prestigious all-girls private boarding school Emma Willard (the alma mater of US Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand), where annual tuition is $43,600. His upstate colleague John McDonald sent his daughter to a Catholic school in Cohoes. Yet this month he tweeted that he was “perplexed by the Charter School proposal in NYC” — as if it’s a mystery why anyone thinks that everyone should have options for their children’s education.
The issue right now is Gov. Hochul’s push to allow dozens more charters to open in New York City in coming years, so that more city families have more choices — including alternatives to the charters already up and running.
If you don’t have the income to allow for a private or Catholic school, public charter schools are your only viable alternative to the regular public system, where your kids’ future is determined by your Zip code, no matter how bad (or just wrong for the child) your assigned school might be.
Another charter critic, Leonie Haimson of the UFT-allied group Class Size Matters, explained her decision to send her kids to private high schools a decade ago: “It is a parent’s responsibility to find a school that they believe best fits their children’s needs.”
Absolutely. But it shouldn’t, needn’t , be only parents with money who can live up to that responsibility.
We don’t remotely begrudge the educational choices any of these people made in their own lives. But having done so, they have absolutely no credibility arguing against school choice. And they are betraying poor people from having the freedom that they enjoyed.
It’s not just hypocrisy, but supreme arrogance, that they so smugly insist on standing in the way of the families who want what they see as better options for their children.