PAGE: Side trip to shop schools

COMMENTARY:

Parenting humbles any of us who try it — even new residents of the White House.

Choosing a new puppy? Ha! The Obamas face a much tougher public relations dilemma: Are they willing to put their school-aged daughters where daddy’s political promises have been?

The education world is waiting to see whether Sasha, 7, and Malia, 10, will be sent to private school while their father continues to oppose tax-supported programs that offer a similar choice to less-fortunate parents.

The question of vouchers as an alternative to public schools crosses color lines, but it is particularly appropriate for the nation’s first African-American president.

Black students disproportionately find themselves in underperforming schools. In fact, opinion polls by think tanks like the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies have found black parents favor vouchers by larger majorities than white parents do.

Yet teachers unions lead opposition to such alternatives, even though studies like a 2004 Thomas B. Fordham Institute report find big city public school teachers to be more likely than the general population they serve to have their own children in private schools.

In Mr. Obama’s hometown, Chicago, for example, 38.7 percent of public school teachers sent their children to private schools, the Fordham study found, compared to 22.6 percent of the general public.

In Washington, D.C., 26.8 percent of public school teachers sent their children to private schools, versus 19.8 percent of the public.

A voucher program Congress imposed on the District in 2004, which granted $7,500 a year for 1,903 students, emerged as an issue in Barack Obama’s third televised debate with Sen. John McCain.

Mr. McCain said the District’s Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee supported vouchers. Mr. Obama argued that she didn’t. Instead, Mr. Obama said, she supports publicly funded, privately run charter schools. “I doubled the number of charter schools in Illinois,” Mr. Obama pointed out, “despite some reservations from teachers unions.”

Actually, Mr. McCain was right, inasmuch as Miss Rhee has favored “choice,” although she’s lukewarm at best on the voucher issue. “I would never, as long as I am in this role, do anything to limit another parent’s ability to make a choice for their child,” she told the Wall Street Journal this year. “Ever.” But after the debate, a spokesman said the chancellor, along with Mayor Adrian Fenty, “disagrees with the notion that vouchers are the remedy for repairing the city’s school system.”

That’s true. No single remedy can fix challenges as complex as those posed by public education. Every child learns differently. But Miss Rhee’s defense of “choice” offers the right direction.

Any program that expands educational choices also opens opportunities for more kids who don’t have enough chances to move up the ladder to a better life - maybe even to the White House.

As a parent who reluctantly moved my own child to private school after the fifth grade, I appreciate the value of school choice. But what about the kids left behind in failing schools?

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