Rahm Emanuel Disses Public Schools – OpEd

Every honest person knows how truly inferior most urban public schools are. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel knows this as well as anyone, which is why he decided to send his kids to a private school this fall. Not just any private school—the most prestigious, expensive school he could find—the University of Chicago Lab Schools. His interest in exposing his children to a diverse environment is obviously quite limited.

Emanuel is in good company. When the Obamas lived in Chicago, they too sent their children to the elitist University of Chicago Lab Schools; now they send their kids to the same rich-man’s school that the Clintons chose for Chelsea. The previous mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, also refused to expose his children to the public schools. Nor were they good enough for another liberal Chicagoan’s kids: Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Who can blame them? Fully 40 percent of Chicago’s public school teachers think so little of the schools they work in that they elect to send their own children to private schools.

None of this would matter a whole lot if these same rich people who think the public schools are inferior to private ones would support school vouchers for the poor. But they don’t. Instead, they grab all the loot they can from the public school unions, and then bypass the public schools when it comes to their own children.

Emanuel told the CBS affiliate that if he sent his kids to a public school, his “unbelievably smart” kids would figure it out. “They know if they become instruments or second priorities,” he said. I have news for him: even kids not as “unbelievably smart” as his know when they are not a top priority, and none know it better than those forced to go to schools shunned by the rich.

This begs the question: if urban public schools aren’t good enough for rich kids, most of whom are white, precisely whose kids are they fit for?