It’s a perennial story – the seemingly eternal parade of politicians that new generations of hypocrites can join, trailing after their ideological forebears as they bang the proverbial drum for degenerate, unresponsive, tax-funded public schools on the federal, state, and local level, and implying that private schools are elitist and wrong – all while they either send their own children to private schools, or as they neglect to mention that they, themselves, might have gone to private school.
And now, in beautiful, peaceful, pristine Chicago, the person at the very apex of the city’s public teacher’s union is scrambling to deflect and gaslight after she was caught sending her son to an elite private school.
If you are appropriately shocked (wink), wait until you read about her purported “defense.”
Mairead Elordi reports for The Daily Wire:
“The president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is defending her decision to send her son to a private school after facing backlash for the decision.
CTU President Stacy Davis Gates is sending her freshman son to a Catholic school on the South Side of Chicago.”
Of course, she didn’t offer a justification concerning her own work – didn’t offer anything about her public notoriety in a political sphere being a liability for her son within the tax-funded cesspool, wherein some teachers who might not like her stewardship of the union might possibly exact revenge through maltreatment or mistreatment of the child.
Instead, she blamed taxpayers.
Specifically, she blamed those who favor not real freedom, but the veneer of freedom in the form of vouchers handed by government to parents to introduce a small amount of “competition” into the system.
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Indeed, Ms. Davis Gates implies that the problem isn’t her own towering hypocrisy, it’s the tiny bit of leeway that parents might have in “school choice” – leeway that could see them redirect kids and funds away from the worst schools where the parents know their children would be trapped.
“In her defense of the decision, Davis Gates criticized school choice, blaming such policies for the lack of resources at Chicago’s public schools.”
But why would she worry about charter schools being a “drain” on the old and rotting core of the Chicago system? After all, in June, she helped end the Chicago voucher program. Which might be part of the problem she now is trying to cover-up -- a problem that shows she wasn’t exactly sincere when “speaking up” to end that program. As Elordi notes:
“In June, the Illinois legislature opted not to renew the school voucher program.
‘I’m also a mother,’ Davis Gates said on March 6 of last year. ‘My children go to Chicago Public Schools. These are the things that legitimize my space within the coalition.’”
In other words, in March, Davis Gates openly said that her children attend public schools, even going so far as to claim that such a family decision “legitimizes” her position within a coalition of people trying to end the vouchers.
Now, the truth has emerged.
“The revelation of Davis Gates’ decision to opt for private school sparked immediate backlash, with critics accusing her of hypocrisy.”
And she not only pushes the canard that public schools would perform better if only some of that stolen tax cash weren’t turned into vouchers and redirected by parents to other schools – a policy she helped end in June – she wants to mix race into the gaslighting concoction.
‘It was a very difficult decision for us because there is not a lot to offer black youth who are entering high school’ in Chicago, Davis Gates told WBEZ.”
And, get this, in her implacable defense-through-attack, in her nauseating attempt to divert attention from reality, Davis Gates cites qualitative reasons for sending her offspring to private school – reasons she seems blithely unaware could also enter the minds of the less well-to-do taxpayers and parent/taxpayers who might want, but cannot afford, to participate with private schools.
“’In many of our schools on the South Side and the West Side, the course offerings are very marginal and limited,’ she said. ‘Then the other thing, and it was a very strong priority, was his ability to participate in co-curricular and extracurricular activities, which quite frankly, don’t exist in many of the schools, high schools in particular.’”
Truly, a unique child. Thank goodness his living-indirectly-off-the-tax-dole mom seems to have such a keen grasp of his interests.
Of course, those who have a firm grasp of the inextricable connection between the immorality of tax-funded schooling and the tawdry “Tragedy of the Commons” nature of resultant school content know that the “public school system” cannot be fixed because it is predicated on theft and destroys real value-reflection through choice.
Likewise, those who understand freedom also know that “vouchers” do not allow for real freedom in any way. Voucher systems are funded through the initial immorality of taxation, and are offered by milquetoast “conservatives” as a tactic to let parents find a few more options. Vouchers and “charter schools” also tend to see the recipient schools become infected with government ideology and, eventually, see them forced to wrestle with the same kinds of unworkable problems of the “old-school” public schools.
In America, the original “old-school” system was private, and, as people like Alexis de Tocqueville noted in “Democracy in America,” circa 1835, American literacy was the envy of many in other nations. But it has been ruined by government involvement and union power within that collectivist system.
Ms. Davis Gates has her hands full if she expects desperate parents and other taxpayers to forgive her haughty deprecations and deceptions as she attempts to deflect from her own double-standards and to keep the terrible Chicago school system sucking up the earnest work of the citizens.
If people really were free, they not only could cite her for her double-standards, they could stop paying her fellow unionized teachers.
But unions in America have been given far too much slack and admiration. It’s one thing for workers to form unions in nations where the government controls economic choice and the freedom to start businesses that aren’t at the mercy of that government. Thus, when the Gdansk shipyard union “Solidarnosc” engaged in a work-stoppage to protest the Soviet-Polish government, it was very appropriate for freedom-backers to applaud.
But in the US, in a state where the taxpayer is forced to fund a communist teaching system, the union is tied to and benefits from the state. The union is not fighting against the government. In The US, teachers could enter the private market if they want to. There is no USSR stopping them from doing their work in a free, competitive sphere.
Thus, we can see that it is the taxpayers who need to be free, and they are the very people whom Ms. Davis Gates insults with her fatuous deceptions and claims of uniqueness.