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No school choice for lawmakers?

We spotted this over the weekend:

I called a lobbyist and asked him for a number: how many of the 212 members of the New York State Assembly and the New York State Senate send their children to private schools? These are the people who make the rules for the public-school system. As the state constitution says, "the legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein the children of the state may be educated." How many of them, after they do their constitutional duty, send their children to those schools? Or, after they pass laws affecting the public schools, how many send their own kids to private schools?

He couldn’t tell me. (In fact, considering the age of most lawmakers, he said the real question has to do with the legislators’ grandchildren.) The answer, however, should be well-known.

Because common sense suggests that legislators who have children in public school will be especially interested in improving them, why not make it a requirement: the children of legislators must go to a public school.

Oh, we will make some allowances for very special situations depending on the needs of the child. But we won’t make allowances based on the wallet of the legislators, or the decision that what is good enough for everyone else is not good enough for his or her kid.

In addition, the same rule will apply to administrators in the New York State Education Department. You want to make and enforce education regulations? Wonderful, and your children will be in the schools where those regulations apply.

One final piece. If you are an officer at the state level in a teachers’ union, either the National Education Association of New York or the New York State United Teachers, your kids are in public schools. If you lobby for more public funding for education, as well as protecting the rights of accused teachers, place your children in those schools.

If the people responsible for shaping the public-school system have their own children in them, we won’t be surprised when the schools are more effective. In addition, we can expect the distance between the best and the worst to shrink when influential people must register their children in poor schools.

The Chalkboard finds the idea atrocious:

Horrible, horrible, idea. Cruel, even.

No one – no matter who they are – should ever be forced to send their kids into an educational environment that wastes a child’s time, puts him or her in danger, or limits their ability to have a productive adult life in our democracy. Just because someone is an elected official doesn’t mean they should send their kids to crappy schools.

It just would be nice if they thought of the rest the parental planet when they voted on education issues.

But the school choice movement has actually been here before.  From Clint’s book Voucher Wars, p. 28:

Back in Milwaukee, Polly Williams (the Wisconsin legislator responsible for enacting the Milwaukee voucher program-ed.) was still shaking things up.  She had learned that most of the Milwaukee Public School teachers, like many urban public school teachers around the nation, sent their own children to private school.  Yet they had the audacity to challenge the school choice program.  Fine, said Polly: if the public schools are good enough for our kids, they ought to be good enough for their kids.  So she announced that she would sponsor legislation making it a condition of employment that public school teachers send their own children to public schools.  The response was death threats on Polly’s home answering machine.  Tongue in cheek, I had to advise Polly that her proposal would be unconstitutional–public school teachers, like all Americans, have a constitutional right to send their children to private schools.  But the point about the union’s hypocrisy was brilliantly made. 

And, of course, public schoolteachers are still much more likely to send their children to private schools.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that!