(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) After years berating school choice proponents as fascists and smearing private schools as “segregation academies,” the president of one the country’s largest teachers unions was exposed as a hypocrite who sends her son to a posh private school.
Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, sent her 14-year-old son to a private Catholic school in the city, the Daily Mail reported. Her two younger children reportedly attend a public elementary school in Chicago.
The hypocrisy of Gates’s double-standard is particularly glaring given her voracious public animus toward private schools and supporters of school choice.
The teachers union boss has even used her children as talking points to bolster her pubic school bonafides, declaring last year that, “I’m also a mother. My children go to Chicago Public Schools. These are the things that legitimize my space within the coalition.” She repeated the exaggerated claim again when she told a local magazine that, “I can’t advocate on behalf of public education without it taking root in my own household.”
The union boss who has castigated parents for wanting to provide their children the best possible educational opportunities through the empowerment of school choice warned that she was “concerned about the encroachment of fascists in Chicago,” when asked in a 2022 interview if she worried “about school-choice and privatization supporters running for the school board, and a strategy to oppose that?”
Davis Gates’s strategy, in at least one case, was to send her son to private school, which didn’t prevent her from fuming on Twitter that “*School choice* was actually the choice of racists. It was created to avoid integrating schools with Black children. Now it’s the civil rights struggle of our generation?”
in her official response, Stacy Davis Gates says she was "forced" to send her son to a private school.
what about other families with kids stuck in your failing government schools, @stacydavisgates?
shouldn't they have the same opportunity to escape? pic.twitter.com/wdPX1UC7P5
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) September 8, 2023
The teachers union chief’s opposition to school choice is nothing new, with David Gates in 2018 decrying private schools as “segregation academies,” writing “Call them private schools supported by taxpayer funds—vouchers—so your northern cousins understand better.”
David Gates defended her decision to choose a private school because Chicago public schools, with the teachers unions running the show, are in shambles and a dead end for education.
“It was a very difficult decision for us because there is not a lot to offer black youth who are entering high school” Davis Gates told WBEZ Chicago. “In many of our schools on the South Side and the West Side, the course offerings are very marginal and limited. 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.”
Corey DeAngelis, a school choice advocate and senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, said Davis Gates’s explanation only served to amplify her hypocrisy.
“I’m glad she has education opportunities for her family, but she shouldn’t fight against school choice for others,” DeAngelis told Fox News Digital. He said the teachers union boss should “resign in disgrace” for exaggerating her family’s public school roots publicly, while sending her son to a private school.
“The truth is she knows her unionized government schools are failing children,” DeAngelis said. “She got her own child out of the dumpster fire that is Chicago Public Schools. Less fortunate families should be able to escape those failure factories, too.”
Mark Pellin is an editor at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/sabrepaw70.
