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As a parent, Gore abandons public schools
USA Today
Wednesday, September 20, 2025
Samuel G. Freedman
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As a parent, Gore abandons public schools By Samuel G. Freedman Two springs ago, a few months before I enrolled my children in Public School 290 in Manhattan, I met with the principal. She led me up and down the steep stairs of the century-old building, through the lunchroom doubling as a gym, past the auditorium housing the art studio, and into classrooms where the quality of teaching was nothing short of luminescent. Then she excused herself to leave the school for her next appointment, a meeting with Vice President Al Gore. Without knowing what exactly transpired there, I only can surmise that Gore was shaping the education plank of his coming presidential campaign. And his famously meticulous research certainly served him well in leading him toP.S. 290, a remarkable place. I like to think that in some small way Gore's $115 billion package of aid to public schools, with its emphasis on construction, owes something to what he learned about my children's school. Unfortunately, no amount of study and empathy can compensate for Gore's own abdication of public education as a parent. The product of Washington's effete St. Albans School himself, he pulled his own children out of public school in northern Virginia to ensconce them in his own alma mater and Sidwell Friends, an equally rarefied and expensive environment. These choices, and the hypocrisy they reveal, mock Gore's well-crafted campaign image as the champion of public education. If anything, they leave him singularly ill-prepared to resist the creation of a federal program of school vouchers. I still will vote for Gore this fall, but I also think it is no mere coincidence that George W. Bush, clueless on so many other issues, evinces a genuine passion for education reform. His twin daughters attended a public high school in Austin before entering Texas and Yale universities this fall. Sadly, Gore typifies a number of advocates who support public education for anybody, it seems, except their kids. The schools chancellor in New York, Harold Levy, sends his two children to Dalton, a private school costing nearly $20,000 a year. The leader of a program that invites wealthy, powerful or famous figures to serve as ''Principal For A Day'' in a New York public school has her children in a parochial school. It is all well and good to espouse one's commitment to the principle of public education as a foundation of democracy. But in my experience as a parent, and also as a journalist often reporting on schools, I have seen quality schools result more commonly from enlightened self-interest. When your own child is at stake, you will buy those school supplies the teacher can't afford, volunteer at story time and on field trips, and donate money for the playground equipment or air conditioning. You will vote for the school budget when it's on the ballot, even if your infant vomits inside the station wagon on your way to the polls. You will come to understand that your interests are not entirely consistent with the interests of the teachers' union. You will value the union for its efforts to raise salaries and limit class size; you will decry the union for the way it protects incompetents and tries to control all hiring. You will resent the way standardized tests force gifted teachers to tailor their lessons to the expected content, and yet you will want some kind of formal accountability for teachers of lesser commitment. You also will realize that a politician personally detached from public schools, such as Gore, knows none of this in the visceral way you do. He needs campaign contributions, campaign volunteers and reliable votes, all of which the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association can provide in profusion. It tells us everything about Gore's vulnerability on educational issues that the local high school to which he refused to send his youngest child, Al, Jr. -- Woodrow Wilson High School -- is one that minority parents from elsewhere in Washington crave for their children. Even with 40% of its students scoring below basic levels on standardized math and reading tests, the online magazine Salon has reported, Wilson High School somehow produces National Merit Scholars and Ivy League college admissions for its best students. Imagine what a powerful symbol Gore would have provided by putting his namesake son in Wilson. And imagine what he might have learned as a Wilson parent about the confounding contradictions within public education. A mind as fine as his certainly would have begun searching for solutions -- not as a political stance, not as an act of noblesse oblige, but with the desperate commitment to public education that many of us parents share. During a debate this past spring between Gore and Bill Bradley in Harlem, a journalist from Time magazine asked, ''Isn't there a public or charter school good enough for your child? And if not, why should other parents have to keep their kids in public schools because they don't have the financial resources you do?'' The best Gore could say, beyond expressing his support for public education in general, was that his parental decision was a private, personal one. I cannot accept that rationale. The truer answer came in 1998, when Congress passed a bill providing $7 million in vouchers for the most impoverished students in Washington's beleaguered public-school system. Its sponsors included not just the expected conservatives, but Rep. Floyd Flake, D-N.Y., a renowned black pastor who helped shepherd it through the House before retiring to become a full-time minister, and a senator from Connecticut by the name of Joseph Lieberman. (Both of them, by the way, are products of public education.) When Bill Clinton predictably vetoed the bill, he declared, ''We must strengthen our schools, not abandon them.'' Like the president, whose daughter Chelsea escaped public education in the sanctuary of Sidwell Friends, his would-be successor has failed to meet that very measure of integrity. And the chasm between Gore's parental deed and his political stance makes even the worthiest education platform nothing but the gentry's pity for the rabble. Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.