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

Reproduced here for fair use and discussion purposes. My comments in bold.
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This is a truly twisted way of looking at education, social policy, and personal obligations to one's children vs. the interests of society as a whole. Read on...

A manifesto.

By Allison Benedikt Posted Thursday, Aug. 29, 2013, at 5:50 AM

Send your kids to public school, even if you can afford private. Future generations will thank you.

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. (Ms. Benedikt lays the groundwork for her thesis. She begins not by identifying the problem for which she will proffer a solution. No, she passes judgment on parents who make personal choices not in accordance with her preferences.) 

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 is the "cart before the horse." People are taking their children out of public schools because of their deterioration. Returning these children would not improve education, it would simply add to the number of children being maleducated.) 

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. (In other words, you should sacrifice your childrens' well-being in the undemonstrable possibility that later generations might benefit decades later. It's likely that Ms. Benedikt doesn't have a similar view regarding the national debt that is being left to our grandchildren to pay.)

(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.) (Rich people are irrelevant. We are really talking about the mass exodus of the middle class from public education, and as of yet Ms. Benedikt has not made an argument in favor of denying them their own choices.)

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. (Hmm. This sounds like the elimination of private schools, just to make sure that everyone receives and equally bad education.) 

Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. (Abstract? When it comes to our children, there is nothing abstract about it. We are talking about real people with real risks. Our children are not social experiments propagated for the benefits they bring to society. The good of society is way down the list. If public schools fail, it is only because they did not do as they are charged.)

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. (Ummm, no. It sounds more like that Ms. Benedikt wants to curtail parental power in favor of an illusory "benefit" to other interests who may or may not have the interests of the parent or the child in mind. Further, parents have very little power in the public school system. Indeed, Ms. Benedikt betrays this in her interest to bolster government schools at the expense of generations of children. There is no evidence whatsoever that parents hold sway in the public schools, or those schools would already be what Ms. Benedikt wants them to be.) 

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. (The worst public schools in America [Washington, DC] are also the best funded. Where is all that money going at $18,000 per child? There is no reason at all for schools having to rely on fundraising with this kind of money in play.) 

Everyone, all in. (By the way: Banning private schools isn’t the answer. We need a moral adjustment, not a legislative one.) (So now she denies that she wants to ban private schools, but she does not offer a mechanism to make public schools "everyone, all in.")

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. (Whaaa? Who is she to decide what others might think are compelling reasons? This is typical leftist thinking, to presume for you what are good and bad reasons. Leftists are all about controlling people. They love to bring the coercive power of government to bear on people who they believe aren't doing the "right thing." They know better than you what is good and bad, because you are too stupid or too self interested to make proper choices.) 

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. (Another bare assertion that has yet to be backed up.)

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. (Again she presumes to tell us all what we need, and no doubt is quite willing to make sure we conform to her precepts.) 

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. (A generalization based on supposition and nothing else.) 

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. (Another bare assertion, unsubstantiated by nothing more than her worldview.) 

She may not learn as much or be as challenged, but take a deep breath and live with that. (Now I'm wondering if she's writing satirically. It's just fine that your child gets a substandard education, because it's supposed to benefit public schools in the long run? This is the reason we should sacrifice our children on the altar of the "good of society?" What?) 

Oh, but she’s gifted? Well, then, she’ll really be fine.

I went K–12 to a terrible public school. (Based on her presentation in this article, she came out maleducated. 

Here comes some anecdotal evidence from which Ms. Benedikt will make generalizations as to what is good for everyone else...) 

My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book. There wasn’t even soccer. This is not a humblebrag! I left home woefully unprepared for college, and without that preparation, I left college without having learned much there either. You know all those important novels that everyone’s read? I haven’t. I know nothing about poetry, very little about art, and please don’t quiz me on the dates of the Civil War. I’m not proud of my ignorance. But guess what the horrible result is? I’m doing fine. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that I got a lame education. I’m saying that I survived it, and so will your child, who must endure having no AP calculus so that in 25 years there will be AP calculus for all. (The educational malpractice perpetrated against Ms. Benedikt manifests in her lack logical and thinking skills. She is quite content with her ignorance, her lack of understanding, and the things she didn't learn in school. And this is what she wants to foist on all the rest of us. Why? Because what is good for public schools is more important than personal choice and what is good for children. Wow.)

By the way: My parents didn’t send me to this shoddy school because they believed in public ed. They sent me there because that’s where we lived, and they weren’t too worried about it. (Can you imagine?) Take two things from this on your quest to become a better person: 1) Your child will probably do just fine without “the best,” so don’t freak out too much, but 2) do freak out a little more than my parents did—enough to get involved. (In other words, they didn't care enough about her to either involve themselves in her public school, which was the panacea she offered above, or to proactively do something about her poor education by getting her out of the bad situation. Yet she suggests that the solution is for parents to do for their children at home to make up for what the public school failed to do. Astonishing!)

Also remember that there’s more to education than what’s taught. 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. Reading Walt Whitman in ninth grade changed the way you see the world? (Ho-boy. More Leftist doublethink. Here she places high value on "diversity," higher than actually learning stuff, as if diversity in itself is automatically beneficial. Well, Ms. Benedikt, guess what? Not everyone values the same thing you do. In fact, it really doesn't matter what you value. People get along quite well in life without ever having met an immigrant from Estonia.) 

Well, getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park near my house did the same for me. In fact it’s part of the reason I feel so strongly about public schools.

Many of my (morally bankrupt) colleagues send their children to private schools. (How selfish they are! How classist! How out of tune with the needs of the whole! They didn't simply make a choice regarding their children's well being. No, they are morally bankrupt! Every one of them are immoral. Why? Because they didn't submit their children to the public school meatgrinder! That is the unforgivable sin.)

I asked them to tell me why. Here is the response that most stuck with me: “In our upper-middle-class world, it is hard not to pay for something if you can and you think it will be good for your kid.” I get it: You want an exceptional arts program and computer animation and maybe even Mandarin. You want a cohesive educational philosophy. You want creativity, not teaching to the test. You want great outdoor space and small classrooms and personal attention. You know who else wants those things? Everyone. (Aaaand, that's bad. Everyone wants good things for their children, but that must be suppressed because it is anti-society. Such independent thinking must be frowned upon in the strongest possible terms.)

Whatever you think your children need—deserve—from their school experience, assume that the parents at the nearby public housing complex want the same. No, don’t just assume it. Do something about it. Send your kids to school with their kids. (Yes, don't help them obtain a scholarship to a private school. Don't facilitate their desire to give their children a better chance at success in life. No, you should send your children to the same crap hole your impoverished neighbor does, so that everyone is equally ignorant at the end of 12 years of indoctrination and educational malpractice!) 

Use the energy you have otherwise directed at fighting to get your daughter a slot at the competitive private school to fight for more computers at the public school. (More government funding! Throw good money after bad so that kids will be able to surf the web but can't read their diplomas! Yes, for the good of society, make everyone just the same, equally stupid, equally unaware of history, math, biology. Because that's FAIR.) 

Use your connections to power and money and innovation to make your local school—the one you are now sending your child to—better. Don’t just acknowledge your liberal guilt—listen to it.