If Public Schools Aren’t Good Enough For The Teacher’s Kids…

Let’s say that you suggest going to a local restaurant, but a friend of yours says he has heard that people who work there won’t eat the food or let their families eat the food. Do you still go to that restaurant or do you go somewhere else?

Suppose you need to get your car worked on. Would you take your car to a shop if you knew that the people who worked there took their own cars somewhere else and told their kids to do the same?

What if we were talking about a hospital. Would you want to have an operation done at a hospital if the doctors and nurses who worked there sent their own kids somewhere else when they were sick? Of course you wouldn’t, because if the people who work there feel that way, obviously there is some sort of problem.

Keeping all of that in mind, read this article from the Washington Times….

“More than 25 percent of public school teachers in Washington and Baltimore send their children to private schools, a new study reports.

Nationwide, public school teachers are almost twice as likely as other parents to choose private schools for their own children, the study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found. More than 1 in 5 public school teachers said their children attend private schools.

In Washington (28 percent), Baltimore (35 percent) and 16 other major cities, the figure is more than 1 in 4. In some cities, nearly half of the children of public school teachers have abandoned public schools.

In Philadelphia, 44 percent of the teachers put their children in private schools; in Cincinnati, 41 percent; Chicago, 39 percent; Rochester, N.Y., 38 percent. The same trends showed up in the San Francisco-Oakland area, where 34 percent of public school teachers chose private schools for their children; 33 percent in New York City and New Jersey suburbs; and 29 percent in Milwaukee and New Orleans.

…”Across the states, 12.2 percent of all families — urban, rural and suburban — send their children to private schools,” says the report, based on 2000 census data.

“Public education in many of our large cities is broken,” the surveyors conclude. “The fix? Choice, in part, to be sure.”

Public school teachers in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, Rochester, N.Y., and Baltimore registered the most dissatisfaction with the schools in which they teach.

“These results do not surprise most practicing teachers to whom we speak,” say report authors Denis P. Doyle, founder of a school improvement company, SchoolNet Inc.; Brian Diepold, an economics graduate student at American University; and David A. DeSchryver, editor of the Doyle Report, an online education policy and technology journal.”

39% of the teachers in Chicago send their kids to private school? 41% in Cincinnati? 44% in Philly? Come on, what does that tell you about the quality of education that the students are getting in these schools when the teachers who work there would rather pay big bucks to a private school than have their kids get a free public education?

Tell ya what, school teachers always complain about being underpaid, so why don’t we help them — and all the other parents out there — with school vouchers? It’ll give parents much more of a choice about where to send their kids to school, it’ll mean competition that will lead to an improved education, and we’re spending the money anyway, right? Every American should at least be able to send their child to a school that’s good enough for the teacher’s kids and school vouchers can help make that possible.

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