Choice is for me, not for thee

Gabriel Sherman's written a very entertaining piece on the furious competition between Washington's elite private schools to enroll the Obama daughters next term. Enjoyable as it is, you may find yourself wishing they could all lose. However, the piece reveals one of th egrubbier, more ghastly sides of the city.

Nonetheless, the issue of where the Obama girls go to school is interesting. Back in 1992 the Clintons toyed with the notion - perhaps even promising? - that Chelsea would attend a bog-standard public (ie, state) school. That didn't survive a recce of the DC public school system (though I suspect that the Secret Service had a say too) and I doubt many people really think the Obamas are going to put their kids into a public school. So Sidwell Friends (where Chelsea went) or Georgetwon Day seems most likely.

And that's fair enough. Here's the thing however: all year long Obama said that, with regard to healthcare, it was only fair that every American have access to the kind of privileged healthcare plan members of Congress have thoughtfully provided for themselves. Nothing wrong with that either. But sauce for healthcare is sauce for education: if everyone should be able to make the same choices as Congressmen and Senators in healthcare, why shouldn't ordinary voters have the same - or similar -  range of choices available to them as do the Wahsington elite when it comes to choosing what school they send their kids to?

I don't think Obama is being especially hypocritical in sending his own kids to the best school he can afford. I just wonder why he doesn't do more to help more families have some of the same choices he does?  What's the difference - apart from the teaching unions' contributions to Democratic politics - between healthcare and education? That is, what's the logic in supporting choice in healthcare but opposing it in education?

Comments

[Anthony]

Broadly speaking, I agree with you.

In fairness to Obama, I believe he has actually made noises regarding support for education vouchers. Whether this will survive contact with the White House I don't know.

On the other hand, Michelle Obama has had some fairly dreary pat left wing things to say about education. These have been rendered the more irritating by the fact that she herself apparently feels that she was shafted by the system, in spite of the fact that she appears to have attended what is more or less the American equivalent of a grammar school.

So... pfff. I dunno. I'll just go back to throwing darts at a picture of Diane Abbott.

[ben]

If what's sauce for healthcare is sauce for education, then why is healthcare a crashing bore but education Topic A?

[MattF]

Reality is that the DC public schools are dreadful-- and the Obamas don't have the option of moving to the suburbs. For more edification, read the front-page story in this morning's NYT about DC's new tough-as-nails public school chancellor, Michelle Rhee.

[Ruck]

I'm not certain that they would have enough security in a public school for presidential kids.

On the more general question of why Democrats are against school choice (e.g. vouchers), I think it has a lot less to do with teachers' unions than it does with the more general disinterest in paying rich people a subsidy to take the best students out of public schools. Good public education is a central element to Democracy, and we have enough trouble getting the system to work without the rich deciding that they can't be bothered to have a dog in the fight. It should be hard to send your kids to prep school, and doing so should be associated with prohibitive costs.

"Good public education is a central element to Democracy": says who? We had democracy in Britain long before anyone thought that a state monopoly of schooling would be a fine thing. As I understand it, the big move to state schooling was nothing to do with democracy; it was intended to make it easier to teach schoolchildren military drill, seen as a good idea given the aggressive attitudes of late 19th century Germany. The church schools, for example, had been cool to the idea of military drill.