New York Teachers Sending Their Own to Private Schools

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The New York Sun

Almost a third of New York City public school teachers send their children to private schools, a new study says.


The study, released yesterday by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, found that 32.5% of the city’s public school teachers send their sons and daughters to private or parochial schools, compared to just 22.7% of all New York City families.


“Those who know best what’s happening in the public schools are not sending their children to public schools,” said one of the authors of the report, David Alan DeSchryver. “It’s a flag. It’s an indication that maybe something is not what it should be in those schools.”


Mr. DeSchryver said the findings might “set off some alarms” with mothers and fathers who aren’t teachers.


“It may be a wake-up call to those families who are not quite satisfied with traditional public schools, if they see that teachers within the district are making choices to get out of these schools,” he said.


Though similar studies were conducted in 1986 and 1995, a comparison was not possible because the Census Bureau changed the way it collected the data, Mr. DeSchryver said.


The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said it’s hard to analyze the new report without being able to compare it to previous years’ data and without knowing how many teachers chose to send their children to religious schools because of their personal beliefs.


But, she said, “The issue of whether school teachers will send their kids to public schools is really a good proxy of whether it’s a good public school.”


She said she believes every school should be a place where all parents – including teachers – would want to send their children and where all educators would want to work.


She said at this point, that’s not the case in the city.


“Teachers are very smart consumers,” she said. “What I take away is one should listen to the teachers about what makes a school a good school. Frankly, if the politicians listened to the teachers more you would have a lot more good schools.”


A spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Education, Michele McManus, pointed out that the “great majority” of teachers here send their children to public schools.


“As we continue to improve public education in New York City, we expect that more and more parents will choose to send their children to our schools,” she said.


Mr. DeSchryver, the editor of an education policy journal, and his two co-authors, Denis Philip Doyle and Brian Diepold, based their research on data collected from 5% of families who participated in the 2000 Census.


They found that nationally, 21.5% of public school teachers send their children to private schools, compared to 17.5% of all families.


The largest differential between public school teachers and regular families is in Rochester, where 37.5% of teachers send their children to private schools, compared to 14.6% of all families.


Other cities with larger differentials than New York City are Nashville, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. New York has the 11th largest differential between public school teachers and non-teacher parents.


Among the 50 largest cities in the country, there are 29 where public school teachers are more likely than other parents to choose private schools for their children. In the remaining 21 cities, public school teachers are more likely to choose public schools than other parents.


In Louisville, for example, 15.2% of teachers chose private school, compared to 24.7% of other parents.


A spokeswoman for the Louisville school district, Lauren Roberts, said, “I think it means that we have an outstanding public school system. Our teachers walk the talk.”


Ms. Roberts said she was surprised that public school teachers in other cities choose private schools for their children at such high rates.


“You would expect that folks who are going to choose to work for a public school system, and believe enough in a public school system enough to work for them, would also believe enough to send their own children there,” she said. “If you work for Pepsi, you don’t drink Coke.”


The authors of the report point to choice as a solution to the problem they say their study highlights.


“Choice, whether it be charter schools or vouchers, should be incorporated into that longer term solution,” Mr. DeSchryver said. He said while it would be nice to fix up all the public schools so that teachers would send their own children there, there is an issue of “immediacy.”


“How many generations of students are going to have to wait before something happens?” he asked.


The New York Sun

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