Are Senators Who Attended Elite Schools Blind to the Plight of American Parents? – IOTW Report

Are Senators Who Attended Elite Schools Blind to the Plight of American Parents?

Intellectual Takeout: Following the vitriolic confirmation of Betsy DeVos as the U.S. Secretary of Education, Cheryl Kirk, a mother of three children in the Indiana school choice program, took to the web to write an open letter to Senator Al Franken about his opposition to school choice for families like her own. In Kirk’s eyes, it seemed quite elitist for Franken to send his own children to Dalton School, an elite private academy, while telling her family that they should be content with D or F rated public schools.

In her frustration, Ms. Kirk went on to tell Franken:

“I assume you realize that the fancy Dalton School you are used to isn’t really what school is like for regular Americans like me. I certainly hope you realize that.”

Like Ms. Kirk, one would think that Senator Franken would realize this. But what if he doesn’t?

That thought actually might be a greater possibility than we realize. Is it possible that politicians like Franken are opposed to allowing parents to send their children to better schools because they haven’t had much exposure to what’s happening in the public schools?

With this thought in mind, I decided to investigate how many current Senate members graduated from a private school. The chart below lists this information in order by state.

h/t Bruce

17 Comments on Are Senators Who Attended Elite Schools Blind to the Plight of American Parents?

  1. Margaret Thatcher fired one of the ministers in her government because she said he had been seduced by the trappings of office.
    I think these politicians get to DC and become seduced and accustomed to the trappings of office. They forget what life is like outside the butt kissing, quid pro quo bubble of DC.

  2. Al Franken fell out of his clown car and landed in clown city where he gets a welfare check of 165,000 dollars a year to perform his old stand-up clown routine along with 99 other clowns also on public taxpayer funded welfare!

  3. The public school system has been effed up too long. I’m from Milwaukee, and my neighborhood was about 65% black. What did the public schools do? They bussed my brother and me to a school that was 90% white, to integrate the school. Apparently they didn’t notice that we were white. This happened in 1975. Still waiting for the schools to upgrade education.

  4. Franken cannot claim complete ignorance. He must have some idea of the problem with public school. That’s why he pays the huge tuition to send his kids to that elite private school.

  5. The problem is bigger and more obvious that that: the majority of public school teachers nationwide, who are universally members of the teachers’ union, send their children to private school.
    What more do you need to define failure?! The teachers won’t send their own kids to the schools that employ them!
    Throw that i up on a screen and make the Union defend the status quo. They can not.

  6. It’s not that they don’t realize that so many public schools have failed utterly in their task to educate, it’s that they know but don’t care. They owe their allegiance to the Teachers Unions that in some areas of the country (far more then people like to admit) the teachers care more for their own futures then they do for the kids under their wing. Giving parents a way out of this morass would hack off the unions who in turn may hold back donations and support to these easily bought Democrat (and I suspect a few Republicans) lawmakers. The parents have to fight hard in those areas where the education system is a rotting example of greed run amok and makes a mockery of the once proud and successful public education system used to be just to get a choice for the kids future.

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