Seattlistas Against Choice

Seattlistas seem not to be such big believers in choice after all. After all, King County residents are not even allowed to pull weeds without first obtaining the permission of the city’s latte marinated cognoscenti. Oh yeah, Seattlistas believe that mothers should be able to choose whether or not to kill their unborn babies. But Seattlistas do not believe that, once born, parents should be allowed to choose where to send their children for their education.
After years of permitting parents dissatisfied with their neighborhood schools to send their children to a better school, those compassionate Seattle liberals are now telling parents that they have to enroll their kids where they are told. And they are being told that they will have to attend a school in their own neighborhood. Poorly maintained? Indifferent teachers? Impoverished? Dangerous? That’s just too bad.
It’s supposedly about saving money. Seattle schools are facing a $20 million shortfall. Currently, Seattle provides transportation to children who wish to attend better, safer schools away from their home neighborhoods. Seattle spends $1200 per year, per student on transportation – far, far more than neighboring cities. Terminating that service would save the school district millions. Politicians and educrats have one strategy in common. Whenever they want more money, they take a particularly popular program and hold it hostage unless they are given more money.
Ending the bus service would certainly save some money, but why not simply end the bus service and allow parents who are willing to drive their own kids to the school of their choice? The reason is that, it’s not fair. Not all kids have parents who care enough to do that.
Seattle’s Chief Academic Officer, Steve Wilson, explains. "The haves get to do something and the have-nots do not," he said. "That's a serious equity issue."
Good grief! So now we’re going to redistribute parental love and attention?
It seems to me that it’s a serious equity issue when only rich kids get to attend shiny, safe new schools in their home neighborhoods, while the poor kids in the rough neighborhoods are shut out. But that’s not how the Seattlistas see it. Former president Jimmy Carter once expressed sympathy for those who wished to defend the “ethnic purity” of their neighborhoods. I’m sure he would approve of Seattle’s new plan to keep the poor kids out of the best schools.
Where in the world did Seattle get the idea that it should be in the business of rationing expressions of parental interest in their children? What gives Seattle the right to get into the business of leveling the playing field between kids with caring parents and those with parents who don’t really give a rip? As is always the case with socialists who see unfairness, they hobble those who do a good job so that their results will be no better than the slovenly.
The next thing we’ll hear is that all children will be required to spend at least 5 hours per day in front of a television so that even the kids with attentive parents will experience the same mind numbing that children with negligent parents endure. I can picture some little equity drone in a cubicle trying to come up with some way to force all children to grow up with abusive drunks. That should even things up a bit.
And the experiment with school choice was never really a matter of providing choice after all. It was about competition. Seattle schools were losing students to parochial and private schools and thought that school choice would lure some of those kids back into the public school system. It hasn’t. Parochial school enrollment has grown a bit, keeping up with population growth.
The Seattle public school system also complains that freedom of choice has also complicated funding and staffing issues for the lousy schools that parents pull their children from.
Is that a bad thing? Successful schools are the fruit of the quality of the people doing the teaching. If bad schools are losing students, then the staff at those schools should not feel secure in their jobs.
Certainly the educrats resent it when parents have the power of the consumer who can take his business to whomever gives him the best deal.
Seattle’s educrats will no doubt sleep better knowing that their customers are captive once again.