Why do so many public school teachers send their own children to private schools?

The Washington Times reports:

“Nationwide, public school teachers are almost twice as likely as other parents to choose private schools for their own children, the study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found. More than 1 in 5 public school teachers said their children attend private schools.”

“In Washington (28 percent), Baltimore (35 percent) and 16 other major cities, the figure is more than 1 in 4. In some cities, nearly half of the children of public school teachers have abandoned public schools.”

“In Philadelphia, 44 percent of the teachers put their children in private schools; in Cincinnati, 41 percent; Chicago, 39 percent; Rochester, N.Y., 38 percent. The same trends showed up in the San Francisco-Oakland area, where 34 percent of public school teachers chose private schools for their children; 33 percent in New York City and New Jersey suburbs; and 29 percent in Milwaukee and New Orleans.”

Wow! That’s a huge percentage of public school teachers who send their own children to private schools. I wonder why they do that. Let’s see what the education bureaucrats have to say about this. The article continues:

“Michael Pons, spokesman for the National Education Association, the 2.7-million-member public school union, declined a request for comment on the study’s findings. The American Federation of Teachers also declined to comment.”

Of course those bureaucrats have no comment. Can you imagine the CEO of Coco-Cola being caught drinking Pepsi? Or the CEO of Ford being caught driving a Toyota? Or Bill Gates being caught using Linux? Any of those incidents would be hugely embarrassing. So of course the bureaucrats who run the teachers’ unions don’t want to explain why so many public school teachers send their own children to private schools.

The teachers who work in the public schools know a lot about how good or bad those public schools are. So the fact that so many public school teachers send their own children to private schools tells us a lot about how good or bad the public schools are.

Here are three other blog posts that I have written about the quality of U.S. public schools:

The new method of “teaching” math leaves students ignorant and uneducated

We libertarians and conservatives should praise Barack Obama for sending his own children to private schools

People who say U.S. public schools are “underfunded” have no idea what they are talking about