Send Politician's Kids to Public School
You can't care about public education when your kids are in private school
Politicians often try to make themselves look like the everyday Joe. Donald Trump heavily flaunted his love for the McDonald’s Big Mac, Joe Biden made it a point to ride on Amtrak between Delaware and Washington DC, and Kamala Harris was well-known for wearing Converse’s.
With all the populist attempts by politicians, they would logically enroll their kids in public school. Well… wrong. Many politicians often ditch public schools and enroll their kids in private schools. Elizabeth Warren, a heavy champion of public schools, sent her son to private school for most of his schooling, and Barack Obama sent his kids to the UChicago laboratory school and later to Sidwell Friends, an elite private school
As the Heritage Foundation found out, 40% of house members and 49% of senators send at least one of their kids to private school, only 10% of students in America attend private schools. More egregiously though, 57% of senators on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee sent at least one kid to private school, meaning that the people legislating education policy are even less likely to send their kids to public schools than normal legislators.
When politicians themselves don’t send their kids to public schools, it means that they face no consequences to a failing K-12 education system. It makes complete sense why Rudy Giuliani cut the NYC public school budget by 2 billion dollars from 1994 to 1997 or why Mitt Romney heavily railed against federal funding of public schools. They both sent their kids to private schools, meaning they won’t suffer if public education gets defunded.
It’s sensible to make all elected officials send their kids to public schools. If officials are finally required to send their kids to public schools, they’d actually have to bear the effects of their situation and have to suffer. While many people point out that there are some public schools that are very well funded, politician’s children will still have to experience many disasters of public education. Even in well-funded schools, their children will still be subject to needless high-stakes tests and overcrowding. For example, in the well-off Princeton Public Schools, the number one school district in New Jersey, students have endured significant overcrowding and cuts against the school’s budget by the local charter school.
These issues are systematic issues resulting from local, state, and national governments that simply won’t get fixed if you jump to a better public school. Making officials send their kids to public schools, will encourage them to fix the issues that are so clearly baked into the public school system, including overtesting, funding cuts, and overcrowding.
At the same time, there are some valid reasons why politicians send their children to private schools. Most politicians will probably bring up safety as the reason why their children are attending elite private institutions.
While this may apply to people like the President or the Speaker of the House, pretty much any other politician wouldn’t have to be concerned. There’s simply no threat to the child of a rank and file house member. For most people, they’ve probably don’t even know who their local representative is.
The threat, however, is real, but we shouldn’t just let visible politicians off the hook simply because of safety concerns. Instead, we should modify public schools using federal funding to allow the children of well-known politicians to safely attend school, and then require all other politicians to send their kids to normal public schools. This way, politicians will finally see the consequences of their actions.