Turns out that lefty darling and pseudo-public intellectual Michael Moore is basically a school choice supporter. Here’s what he told The Observer (U.K.):
I ask him why he decided to send his daughter to a private school in Manhattan.
‘Oh,’ he says brightly, ‘I went to private school. Just a genetic decision. My wife and I, we both went to Catholic schools, we’re not public-school [which in the US means state school] people.
So it’s not important.
‘No, I think it’s important and the first five years she went to public school, then we moved to New York and we went to see the local public school and we walked through a metal detector and we said, “We’re not putting our child through a metal detector.” We’ll continue our fight to see to it that our society is such that you don’t have to have a metal detector at the entrance to schools. But our daughter is not the one to be sacrificed to make things better. And so she went to a school two blocks away. She just went to the nearest other school.’
He makes it sound as if the other school was just a random choice, but private schools on the Upper West Side are all restrictively expensive, and mostly white, just as the state schools are disproportionately black.
‘Is that a bad thing?’ he asks rhetorically of his decision, ‘I don’t know. Every parent wants to do what’s best for their child. Whatever I can afford, I’m going to get my kid the best education I can get.’
I suggest that, while that may be a natural instinct, it’s hard to see why it’s any different from the Republican philosophy of each man for himself and his family.