I cannot comment on Iowa, or its proposals for using taxpayer dollars to provide private school stipends. I can, however, reveal a dirty little secret from Washington, DC’s wealthiest and most exclusive private schools (e.g. Sidwell Friends, Georgetown Day, St. Albans, Bullis, Gonzaga, et.), and their long held views of public school vouchers.
The money itself, public, private or otherwise, is mostly irrelevant to the elite schools. Washington, DC could double or even triple the voucher amounts and the exclusive schools would still resist enrolling any more than a token number of inner city kids.
This is because each school’s administrators and their respective board of directors fully understands this one point. Their paying customer parents are not shelling out $50K/year/kid in order to have their own kid sitting next to some poor indigenous urban child whose own literacy and numeracy competency is far below grade level. Such underperforming kids are seen as deadweight to the entire learning process and a threat to their own children’s education.
Everyone in power in DC’s elite schools, of course, will always talk a good game about the plight of the poor child and the dire need for universal quality education. It is just that these same people do not want, nor will they accept, those sorts of children in their own schools. After all, that is why they are elite...don’t you know?
And so it goes for MAGA (Microsoft-Apple-Google-Amazon) Democrats in Washington, DC. So it has always gone.
