This photo of young private school students illustrates the Slate.com arguing it’s evil to send your kids to private school
Lalahpolitico: This very disturbing Slate.com article, “If you send your kid to private school, you are a bad person,” came to my attention the other day. There are over 5,000 comments about it. At first I excused Ms. Benedikt’s twisted sentiments as probably due to not having kids yet. But it seems that she does have at least a couple of kids under 12. See this other slate.com article she wrote autobiographically — if you have kids, “Don’t Get a Dog.” [Good but sad advice there.]
Here is an except from…
If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person – A Manifesto
by Allison Benedikt, Aug. 29. 2013
Many of my (morally bankrupt) colleagues send their children to private schools. I asked them to tell me why. Here is the response that most stuck with me: “In our upper-middle-class world, it is hard not to pay for something if you can and you think it will be good for your kid.” I get it: You want an exceptional arts program and computer animation and maybe even Mandarin. You want a cohesive educational philosophy. You want creativity, not teaching to the test. You want great outdoor space and small classrooms and personal attention. You know who else wants those things? Everyone.
Whatever you think your children need—deserve—from their school experience, assume that the parents at the nearby public housing complex want the same. No, don’t just assume it. Do something about it. Send your kids to school with their kids. Use the energy you have otherwise directed at fighting to get your daughter a slot at the competitive private school to fight for more computers at the public school. Use your connections to power and money and innovation to make your local school—the one you are now sending your child to—better. Don’t just acknowledge your liberal guilt—listen to it.
Lalahpolitico: I assume by extension using vouchers or sending your kid to a charter school or home schooling makes you an even worse person — even if your kid partakes of these options with the help of a scholarship. Is Ms. Benedikt’s kind of sentiment [I hesitate to call it thought] symptomatic of class warfare? Caviar Communism? Just needing therapy to work through her history of parental neglect? Jeez.
Parents and voters of LASD, if you really care about the parents and students in the “nearby housing complex,” agitate for district consolidation of LASD and MV-Whisman School District and also MVLA High School District. Let’s have one nice, big unified district with over 20 schools. Then you will be taking action to be truly “inclusive,” significantly increasing the average percentages of English Language Learners (ELLs), foster youth, economicially disadvantaged, and special needs students in the former LASD attendance area. [Assume busing]
[…] public school facilities in LASD. On the other hand, some say the charter’s existence is a “privatization threat” to the “civic institution of the public schools” and in spite of the Prop 39 law, the school […]