To Be Pro School Choice is to Be Pro-City

I have been driving like crazy the last couple of days and when I have not been driving I have been taking care of some family issues. It has been a combination of those two things and the fact that the heat has just taken something out of me that  haven’t written about the primary election results of this Tuesday.

In retrospect I am glad that I have had a minute to think about the election results before I write. For the most part the candidates I wanted to win won with the exception of Rodney Hubbard narrowly losing to Robin Wright-Jones.

That result kind of hit me hard. Not only because I like Rodney a lot; but because I was almost positive he was going to win. I had several passengers tell me they were voting for him and only one stated her support for Wright-Jones (and she was a campaign worker). Driving around I saw many times more Hubbard signs than Wright-Jones signs and Rodney was all over the radio ( even Cedric the Entertainer endorsed him).

I knew that Wright-Jones had some support from the teachers union over Hubbard’s support of school choice; but I did not know that issue was big enough to doom him. So, I have been thinking a lot about this over the past couple of days, and to be quite honest the more I think about issues of education and how they effect out local elections the angrier I become.

Am I mad because teachers unions want to have a political say and protect their jobs? Absolutely not; although I know for a fact there are a few old hard-line Marxists in key positions in the local union and that they still cling to the long defeated notion that a quality education, and indeed success in life, is solely a by-product of how much money is thrown around. I am mad at the fact that, amongst the people I know, the stiffest opposition to school choice comes from those with no children. They are opposed to vouchers based on their political and social ideologies and possibly their hostility towards religion and will vote on that issue. Yet, as they have no children in the home, they are not forced to make the tough decisions about where to send their kids to school or where to live. There is the further issue of some on the left wanting to engage in social engineering and indoctrination in the public schools and fear that children being reared in religious schools would not conform to their values.

If one ventures into the urbanist areas of the city, the gentrifying sections, you will find hostility to school choice and again this has more to do with ideology than what is good for the kids for many ( and others just have an honest difference of opinion). If you go into parts of the city that are dominated by households with children; North City, Southwest City, the immigrant neighborhoods of the south side, etc. you will find widespread support for vouchers. The difference? These people have children and their opinions are informed by experience and  not stuff they have read.

If parents in these neighborhoods cannot get their kids into the right public school, and cannot afford private schools, they will leave the city. Bosnian refugees just came here in the last 15 years and they are already flocking in droves to South County for better schools and other immigrant groups are following them. African-Americans are leaving the city in high numbers for this reason and others and working-class whites have been leaving for decades.

My sister lives in Dogtown and loves it. She sends her kids to St. James the Greater and likes the school; but the tuition is killing her and she is seriously thinking of leaving the city for economic and educational reasons.

There are thousands of households like my sisters and that’s why I don’t see how anyone could be pro-city and anti school-choice. If you want to keep families in the city give their children a fighting chance in life. Some out there may want families to leave the city so that a new crop can restructure the city to their liking. If you notice in the new trendy developments there are very few apartments, restaurants, or stores that are child friendly. But, I cannot believe that this anti-child element is that large, the much bigger element is just not thinking clearly on this issue or just coming from an entirely different place than I am.