What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right? Do you think it’s a good idea for the children of the president or the vice-president to attend a Washington DC public school? I’m not talking about them getting the best available education. I’m talking about the kind of concerns that the Secret Service has in protecting these children from kidnapping or assassination.
While it’s possible to secure a public school just as well as a private one, the bigger the school the harder the job. And it’s very disruptive to the other students. There are people who will pay a lot of money to give their children the opportunity to go to school with the Bush Twins or Chelsea Clinton or Malia and Sasha, but that’s a choice.
Sidwell Friends has been hosting presidential children going back to Teddy Roosevelt, and they have experience with it.
But it’s a big talking point on the right that those elitist Democrats don’t send their kids to school with the “inner city” kids and yet expect everyone else to use dysfunctional public schools.
Sen. Ron Johnson was only pursuing this well-trodden path. After all, he’s really concerned about those inner city kids and he wants to make sure they get a decent education. That’s why he went on a local radio show and made the following remark:
“It’s unbelievable to me that liberals, that President Obama, of course he sends his children to private school, as did Al Gore, and Bill Clinton and every other celebrated liberal,” Johnson said Monday on 1310 WIBA–Madison. “They just don’t want to let those idiot inner city kids that they purport to be so supportive of…they don’t want to give them the same opportunity their own kids have. It’s disgraceful.”
Oops, look at how that came out all wrong!
For starters, it’s logic salad. The implication is that the Clintons, Gores, and Obamas should pay the Sidwell tuition for every ghetto kid in the District. Why don’t they give those kids the same education that they give their kids?
We know that’s not what Sen. Johnson meant, but that’s what he said. And that’s pretty stupid.
He also called inner city kids “idiots,” which didn’t sound very nice. And I’m pretty sure the Sidwell Friends’ admission process screens for idiots, which presents an additional problem for Johnson’s critique.
Now, when the press started calling Johnson’s staff and asking them why Johnson had made this obnoxious and insensitive remark on the radio, at first they couldn’t believe that he’d actually said it. And when they realized that it was on tape, they called the senator out of an important hearing on Iran to talk to reporters at the Washington Post.
“Obviously I am a huge supporter of school choice, it infuriates me that these young inner city kids are trapped in poverty,” he told us. “I was being, that quote is, I’m being very sarcastic in that’s how liberals view these underprivileged kids. That is not my viewpoint in any way.”
But he said he understood how “hearing that little snippet” might make one “go, yikes.”
We asked him if he really believes liberals view inner city children as “idiots.”
“It wasn’t the best word,” he said. “Trust me I wish I would not have said that. That’s not what I mean.”
So, he muffed the delivery of this depressingly familiar talking point. We should all give him a mulligan, right. He was just being sarcastic. It came out all wrong.
If Russ Feingold turns this into a nasty campaign attack ad, he’ll be playing a game of Gotcha!
Except, even if Johnson had delivered this talking point flawlessly, it’s still a cheap shot.
There’s a point to be made in much more general and less personal terms about charter schools and school choice and whether Democratic policymakers are willing to use failing public schools for their own children. But that critique is grossly unfair when applied to the children of the president and vice-president, because there are major safety concerns.
So, once you decide to dumb everything down to score an an easy shot against your political opponents, you lose the right to ask for mercy in return.
Maybe it came out the wrong way. I willing to grant that it sounds worse than anything Senator Johnson intended to say. But he still should have to explain himself, over and over and over again.
Why?
Because that’s how he wants to play this game.
Jimmy Carter did it. Unless they have special needs, EVERY politicians kid should attend public school instead of some snooty “exclusive” private school where they can meet “the right sort of people”. As to claims that public schools are sewers, clean them up!
Chicago had one school where none of toilets worked for a whole year. that wouldn’t happen if the alderman’s and the mayor’s kids went there.
We have to acknowledge that ’77-81 was a different era. The children of politicians were off-limits for partisan attacks. Metal detectors were rare in schools. Rarer were gun-toting angry/crazy people targeting school children.
Even then it wasn’t the most practical decision. Symbolically it was great, but the security likely cost more.
Maybe we shouldn’t elect Presidents that have pre-K through high school age children.
It’s not just the “snooty schools” that politicians send their children to, but that the politicians are products of “snooty schools” themselves.
Carter was also criticized for this by the emerging right wing (who was supporting Reagan). Keep in mind a Democrat will be criticized by the right wing – from the most extreme wingnuts to the pretending-to-be-moderate types in the beltway press – no matter what they do. But a Republican who does the exact same thing will be hailed by the same people for boldness/vision/courage/etc.
If I were dictator, private school would be illegal. But then I suppose you’d have the rich just hosting schools in their homes with private tutors.
I don’t know the answer, but I know where I want to end up: making the rich care enough about the schools. The only way to do that is forcing their children to be part of them with the rest of society.
At least you recognize the futility of reaching your utopia. Hopefully, when you’re our dictator, you will keep that in mind.
Well, it would help if we stopped funding private schools with public money, for starters. I don’t know what it takes for people to feel invested in their community, but when there is such a stratified difference in wealth between the top and bottom, there is no tax base except from the rich. And when they can just buy their way around society — whether through health care or schooling — it’s inevitable that the public systems collapse, and then the public loses confidence in its ability to operate. So they think better to get a tax cut than fund a futile public works project…
Yes, the whole talking point is predicated on the idea that school choice isn’t a sham. Because that’s what they mean when they talk about hypocritical liberals expecting inner city kids to make do with dysfunctional public schools. They won’t support school choice!
But of course that’s not the same thing as abandoning inner city kids. What liberals really want to do is fix the public schools, which of course is more difficult when all of the available funding is going into vouchers.
I’ve never understood how voucherization is supposed to make excellent schools magically appear, anyway. The best schools are still going to have a limited number of spaces available, and there’s all kinds of room for graft in this kind of system, not to mention plain old bad management.
The way I figure it, people can choose their houses too, and there’s even public assistance available in some cases. And the result is that some people have great houses, some people have decent houses, some people have crappy houses, and some people have no houses.
Strictly speaking, private schools in the US don’t get government funding, or didn’t, unless occasionally via grants for special projects. It was traditionally illegal for religious schools to receive public funds. The “school choice” movement is best seen as a way to funnel government money to private (and partly segregated) education.
The tears wept by Senator Johnson (when he’s not calling inner city kids “idiots” are crocodile tears, because the voucher programs he supports will never send more than a tiny minority of disadvantaged children to private school; if he cared about the kids he’d support much better funding for public systems.
Or progressive taxation that forces them to sacrifice something personally in order to choose that pricey private school. With better funding from that taxation, the difference between public and private schools would also be much less.
Not when the schools are largely a product of their environment. It’s just an endless cycle. No jobs in the area, area degenerates due to lack of jobs, property values go down because no one wants to live there due to lack of jobs, school funding dries up because they’re funded by property taxes…and repeats.
So which part is the chicken and which is the egg (if it matters), and which is the most important to tackle so the endless loop stops?
Progressive taxation is principally at the state and federal level. Which, in theory, reduces property tax funding of schools and a downward spiral of “the environment.”
There is, however, merit to local funding of schools. Mindfulness of being part of a community and that everyone in it plays a role in its long-term stability and sustainability requires individual and collective decisions.
More funding is a worthy goal in and of itself, but I think there’s a limit. At some point, if the environment the kids grow up in sucks, no amount of funding is going to improve their academic achievement. Booman edited some Washington Monthly articles I believe that touched on this, although I question the motives/arguments of anyone promoting “school choice” (which I believe the authors did).
I think one thing that could be done, immediately, is decriminalizing drug use in all forms. Eventually, though, the jobs have to come back; private or public. Dealing with the criminalization of people for simply surviving is only half the battle, and that’s where Sanders’ message is important and can intersect with #BLM.
People move to where the jobs are. Jobs only move to where the people are when they’re willing to work for cheap. And cheap labor doesn’t require a well educated or even trained labor pool.
Environments disproportionately dependent on a single employer increase in vulnerability as that company nears the mature age of its life cycle. Say the company remains solid and doesn’t exit the environment for cheaper labor elsewhere and no new larger employers enter it, how fast can the working age population grow in twenty years without introducing a downwardly mobile process?
Funding universal pre-K, as opposed to beefing up funding for elementary schools (of course I want to see more of that too), can make a big difference regardless of neighborhood.
Head Start was effective. But I’m not sure we understand exactly why. I suspect that it wasn’t about academics — which would explain why the Head Start kids didn’t exhibit academic performance through middle school that was different from the non-Head Start kids. (Pushing four and five year old kids to read may even be harmful.) I’d guess that it was getting a jump on healthy socialization with peers and adults that was weak in the home. And possibly — and accidentally — learn to delay of gratification in that maturation window (age 4 to 5).
Sorry. I don’t think it came out wrong at all. Sure, the words came out in a particularly ham-fisted and offensive way. But simply because he inartfully phrased it doesn’t mean that this isn’t exactly what he thinks. These are moments of honesty where the true heart of a dipshit like Johnson is exposed for what it is. No mulligans here. The guy was simply saying what he truly believes. He, like most of his conservative cronies, are just human garbage.
I don’t know how many ‘idiot inner city kids” there are, but I know there are a lot of idiot GOP politicians in this country!
I’m not really sure RoJo even deserves the amount of time you took to write that. I refer to him as America’s Shittiest Senator, and he is, quite possibly, the least intelligent person in the U.S. Senate (and I know that’s saying a lot).
The Democrats have lost just one presidential year Senate election in Wisconsin since 1960, and the only real question in 2016 is how many points Feingold is going to beat Johnson by.
Johnson no, but the issue isn’t limited to him or Wisconsin. Or for that matter the GOP. Denigrating public schools and public school kids is not how a large middle class was created. But it’s an effective means of shrinking it.
What infuriates me is that blatant damn lie right here: “it infuriates me that these young inner city kids are trapped in poverty.”
I mean, why even bother saying this? Any Republikkkan voter taking it literally would reject the dude for pallin’ around with the darker folks, so they must instead be decoding it as “just something he has to say so he won’t be persecuted by the Liberal Press.”
Any sentient political observer, seeing the R after his name, would know it’s a flat out lie.
The only people that would possibly take it at face value might be the Village press, and… ah, I see it know. The game. Carry on, yo.
But not just something he has to say–it’s part of the argument for vouchers. “It’s for the kids!” Except it isn’t.
Pew Report: Economic Mobility
in the United States
IOW, the promise is lip service.
Just ask the Hemingses.
I’m not sure that it’s just in the drafts. Doesn’t this have something to do with equal opportunity?
Speaking of Jefferson, I think this is one area where he does deserve a lot of credit. I don’t know if he had any direct influence on that clause in the Constitution, but he was one of those who were most fiercely opposed to any trace or vestige of hereditary privilege. It’s easy to overlook now, because the question of titles of nobility is so thoroughly moot in the US now, but it was not a settled question in the early republic.
And of course you can still have the hereditary privilege without the titles. All this idolization of job creators may not be un-American, but it is certainly un-Jeffersonian.
Seems pretty much a Freudian slip in which Johnson fesses up that the doesn’t want to pay for anybody’s idiot kids but his own, which sabotages the projection on liberals he wanted to make of that same sentiment.
These guys are so self-assured, they’re getting sloppy. Hope there is someone around to take advantage of these unforced errors to the benefit of progressives in Congress.
Time for progressives to state flat-out that all this private-public nonsense about infrastructure just leads to corruption. Funding public schools adequately and paying for good teachers worked for most white communities until the white parents sought to sabotage public education because of desegregation. It can work again. It is time to forcibly assert a postion in favor of public infrastructure and point out how quasi-market efforts to get there always cost more and engender corruption. We can, in fact, afford full public infrastructure.
And when we have that, we likely will reduce the issues that make Sidwell Friends more attractive than the nearest public school to the White House.
Of course, part of that will have to be a substantial dialing back of the celebrity hysteria about the President. There were early Presidents who could walk without escort in Washington DC.
But then again, the elaboration of power, its symbols, and the complexity of urban civilizations (if that’s not redundant) themselves tend to create the sorts of risks that private school placement seeks to mitigate.
Ron Johnson’s problem is that he is a congenital political liar; he originated the Obamacare cut $700 billion from Medicare and got away with it because of a compromised media. Romney, who retreaded it, was not so fortunate. There’s probably no bigger political scam than that sort of thing.
Amazing how the same people are all for building public infrastructure along the Mexican border. (Oh, right. Mexico’s going to pay for it.)