There are two astoundingly hypocritical groups in the United States.
- Leftist politicians who clamor for higher taxes while aggressively protecting their own money from wasteful government.
- Leftist politicians who fight against school choice for poor families while sending their own children to private schools.
Since I’m a fiscal economist, I should be most upset about the first group, but I actually find the second group to be more nauseating.
I want to focus on that latter group because a small school choice plan recently was eliminated in Illinois and the Wall Street Journal opined on that reprehensible development.
Unions want to kill the program because its popularity showcases the failure of the public schools. Invest in Kids had more than 31,000 applications last year, roughly five students for every scholarship it could provide. Every family lined up for a place at a private school is an indictment of a union monopoly that continues to prioritize its power over student learning. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in districts with low-income families. Black and Hispanic families support the scholarship program in large numbers because they often have children assigned to Illinois schools where less than a third of students are proficient at reading or math… The measurable educational shortfalls continue from fourth to eighth grades, consigning young people to failure before they even reach high school. But don’t trouble the unions with this mass betrayal of minority children.
The elimination of this tiny school choice program is a tragedy.
The fact that it was killed by politicians who send their own kids to private school is disgusting.
And why did the top legislators in Illinois decide to deny educational opportunity to poor families?
The WSJ editorial hints at the answer.
Messrs. Harmon and Welch have each had their political careers funded by more than $1 million in contributions from the state’s teachers unions.
What awful people. I wonder how they can sleep at night.
P.S. While the news from Illinois is depressing, the good news is that school choice is spreading elsewhere, with West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, and Oklahoma all adopting universal or near-universal policies over the past three years.
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Image credit: Chi Hack Night | Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed).
