I am actually reluctant to comment on Slate’s trolling-masquerading-as-analysis piece “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person.” And I certainly don’t want to spend much time refuting writer Allison Benedikt’s fact-free, data-free “argument”: If more upper-middle class and wealthy parents — a.k.a. Slate readers, I guess — sent their kids to their local public schools, the US education system would suddenly improve.

1. So I asked AEI’s Michael McShane for his two cents:

Because public schools are by and large residentially assigned, the rich have their totally awesome (and essentially private due to the home price in the school’s catchment area) public schools and poor people are trapped in failing schools because they can’t move away. That’s what leads to Balkanization. You choosing to send your kids to a suburban public school does nothing for the kids in SouthEast.

Private schools, especially with public support, break the connection between residence and schooling, which holds more potential for desegregation and a mixing of students from different background than residential assignment of public schooling.

2. Aren’t the “bad people” — to use Allison Benedikt’s language — here the ones who would trap lower-income and poor kids in their local education monopoly? Or as Alex Tabarrok puts it: “Barricading parents into the poor schools their government offers them is like barricading people into communist East Germany.”

Tabarrok also notes that merely having more activist parents inside a school monopoly might not change much without competition: “When you complain of delay where is your voice more likely to be heard; at a restaurant or at the department of motor vehicles? It’s the threat of exit that makes people listen.”

3. Oh, by the way, do we have any data on the educational impact of helping lower-income and poor kids escape the public education monopoly? Like, say, data from the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program? Well, the US Education Department’s OSP study found the program, McShane points out, “produced $2.62 in benefits for every dollar spent on it. In other words, the return on public investment for the private-school voucher program during its early years was 162 percent.” What’s more, “The OSP increased the high-school graduation rate of students by 12 percentage points if they were lucky enough to win the annual scholarship lottery.”

4. One more from McShane:

It’s also a proud tradition in America (since Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925) to recognize that children are not instruments of the state. They do not exist to promote the goals of the government or the community, they (and their parents) are free to (within limits) to be educated as they best see fit.  Obviously this person has no idea about the anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrant racism that lead people to make the same argument that she is making, albeit 100 years ago.

White liberal guilt is perhaps one of the most noxious, self-indulgent pastimes of the contemporary suburban / upper-crust urban progressive, and it is meant not to promote reasoned discourse, but to show “courage” in one’s willingness to publicly masturbate over “admissions” of their own class evils.

In short, it is narcissistic onanism disguised as chin-scratching depth of thought — and it is a poison whose toxins continue to work their way through the cultural discourse and into the body politic until the system breaks down, and the various organs war against each other.

As Mark Levin noted yesterday, no where during the King 50th anniversary showcase of prominent liberals not a single one of which supported school choice, was it mentioned that the compulsory consigning of many poor minorities to disastrous schools and a lack of education is one of the primary civil rights issues of our day.

Instead, we were treated to the typical menu of liberal racism masquerading as championing minorities and the poor:  this outrageous move by SCOTUS to strike down certain provisions of the Voting Rights Act, we were told, is a move to rekindle the kind of racial inequality that gave rise to the civil rights movement in the first place.

And yet the idea that “the poor, or minorities, or the infirm” won’t be able to obtain a free photo idea in order to protect the integrity of the franchise — when these same people are able to navigate the same hurdle whenever they purchase cigarettes or liquor or fill out paperwork for some government entitlement program or other — is itself the most crass and transparent form of paternalistic racism one can imagine.

The subtext — from Obama to Clinton to Holder and on down the line — is that the “mass” of blacks and the poor are too stupid to figure out how to get a photo idea.  As if there’s a huge sector of said group that doesn’t already have one.

As I noted yesterday, poor blacks overwhelmingly support school choice. And they should, because it is an actual civil rights issue.  But so long as they keep voting for people who presume to protect them while very obviously holding them in such contempt, things won’t change.

And platitudes and food stamps and more Democrat manipulation meant to keep them on the voting plantation is all they’ll get.