Teachers’ Choices – And Ours

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Stock analysts pay special attention to whether corporate directors buy or sell the stock of companies on whose boards they serve. So it’s important, we are reminded by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, for parents to know whether public school teachers are willing to send their own children to the schools in which they teach. The foundation released a new study this week showing that 32.5% of public school teachers in the New York metropolitan area send their children to private schools. Only 22.7% of all New York families make the same decision.


So it turns out that those most familiar with the quality of New York’s public school system are choosing to send their children elsewhere. If public school enrollments were shares of stock, parents would be well-advised to sell.


The new study must be embarrassing to the teachers unions, whose political opposition to programs that help families choose private schools has been unrelenting. The American Federation of Teachers, for example, opposes any use of public funds that would help needy families afford private school tuition. “The main reason for this opposition,” the union explains on its Web site, “is because public funding of private or religious education transfers precious tax dollars from public schools, which are free and open to all children, accountable to parents and taxpayers alike, and essential to our democracy.”


But it doesn’t do American democracy any favors to relegate our youngest citizens to schools so lousy even the teachers don’t trust them. And no taxpayer in New York can take seriously the idea that such schools are “free.”


We’ll leave it to others to decide whether, as the union suggests, a school becomes less accountable to parents when it’s the parents, not some sprawling education bureaucracy, who are paying the bills. In the meantime, here’s a new form of accountability: The next time New York’s parents visit the public schools for parent-teacher conferences, we hope they ask where the teachers’ own children go to school – and why parents should trust an educational system that doesn’t trust itself.


If the city were to require all its employees to enroll their children in public schools, we might see faster improvement in education reform. The better option, though, is to empower all families to make the same choice that a third of the city’s teachers already have made. That means a school choice program that includes private school as an option.


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