School Choice for Democrats
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, was booed at Tuesday night’s mayoral debate for refusing to answer a question that neither he nor the three other Democrats eyeing Gracie Mansion believe in asking all New Yorkers. The hot question was whether he would send his children to public school or private school. Mr. Miller equivocated and said he and his wife hadn’t made any decision yet.
Mr. Miller’s dilemma is understandable. Like all parents, he wants the best for his children. He knows the difference in standards between private and public schools, having made education a central part of his mayoral campaign. Education appears at the top of the list of issues on his Web site, and he regularly touts his plan to reduce class sizes by 20%. But like the other Democrats, he’s a self-proclaimed champion of the public school system and opposes the introduction of a system that would permit poor children to have the kinds of choices rich ones have, namely, a system of school vouchers.
Vouchers allow parents to choose between the government paying for a place in a public school or helping to defray the cost of private school for their children. By sending his children to private school while restricting poor and middle-class children to public school, he appears, for very good reason, to be hypocritical. This is why the question was asked, and fairly too. Neither C. Virginia Fields nor Anthony Weiner have children, and Fernando Ferrer already answered the question long ago by sending his daughter to a Catholic high school. So Mr. Miller deserves to be put on the spot.
And he’s going to be on the spot for some time, since his children are but 3 and 4. No doubt he will say that his children shouldn’t be made an issue of – and we agree. The issue is where he stands on the most important public policy question in education today. The issue is not his children. It’s his character and sense of fairness. Both he and Mr. Ferrer can afford to both pay the taxes that maintain the state’s costly public school system and pay private school tuition as well – but most New Yorkers can’t.
The fact is that school vouchers would help give other parents this same school choice Mr. Miller has. The speaker said in the debate he wouldn’t give a yes-or-no reply “to the question of where my children are going to spend the next 18 years of their education before I have a chance to look at every school.” The right thing is to let all parents have the same look.