Anyone complaining about the non-selection of a public school is being ridiculous. You don't put your childrens' lives at risk to make a point about education reform. That's like expecting Obama to move his family to Trinidad and turn the White House into section 8 housing.

I love all the self-righteous people who think they should have gone to a public school as some sort of gimmick. They should go to wherever their parents see as the best education they will get, period. Nothing else should matter.

WestEnder, you sound sad... what gives. Sad monolingual disorder? Get beat up in a DC school this year?

Supposedly Obama's girls had slumber parties with Biden's granddaughter and so that's why they wanted to go to the same school, Sidwell Friends. It's good to see that they actually get a say in the decision.

WestEnder, do you actually have any idea what you're talking about? Sure, lots of the schools in DCPS are pretty bad, but some of them are really good. I went to Lafayette and Deal and I got a great education there.

Anyway. Sidwell is a great choice. I grew up at the Quaker meeting located on its lower school campus, and it's a really good facility.

So we now have the first example of Saint Obama using "security" to justify a hypocritical decision. Dick Cheney is laughing in his bunker.

By the way, will Obama support vouchers for DC residents that Queen Eleanor rails against? Or are elite private schools only reserved for people who were bankrolled by Tony Rezko?

By the way, Rahm, baby, love the Metrocards! You learned a lot from your time in the Middle East! I expect the public billboards will be up soon? Who says a cult of personality is inconsisent with a democracy?

The only quesion is why anyone would send their kids to DC schools? Feeding your kids into those ignorant-thug assembly lines is de facto child abuse.

What an amazingly dopey thing to say. WifeRat and I are in the middle of figuring out what to do with BabyRat when we get back from Fargo. Even though we were far from the mean streets of DC, we still ended up sending her to private school while we were in the MidWest. It had nothing to do with whether or not the public schools were any good, we made the best choice for our family. In this case, that meant sending our child to private school. Our decision wasn't a referendum on our feelings about public schools, but a reflection of our current circumstances.

Here here Hillrat!

I was public schooled and damned proud of it.

I definitely understand why anyone, including Obama, needs to make the best possible choice for their children. However, that does not mean this wasn't an opportunity lost on his part to send a strong message. It's just one tiny little chip in the veneer of his image, and there will be more to come as people try to wrangle with his personal decisions and justify his need to appoint DC insiders to accomplish his Change agenda. I think the honeymoon will be fairly short lived.

So you acknowledge that test scores in DC are abysmal (by and large, with exceptions) and that many DC schools are broken-down, filled with violence, and dysfunctional, yet anyone that mentions this or take their kids out of that are racist(except I guess the many black people that do this)?

So it's ok if I say this or do this if I'm black, but if I'm white I'm racist for doing it?

Name one thing I've said about DCPS that isn't true.

I don't have hostility toward black people. I have hostility toward con artists, lazy fucks feeding off my tax dollars, and the general 'me first, taxpayers last' mentality that ran the school system into the ground. Sortof the same hostility I have toward most of the Bush regime which I have to note has damn few black people involved. Unless you count Colin Powell, who was actually one of the good guys until he was hoodwinked and used. And even though Condi Rice is a big giant liar and has caused us great problems abroad, I'll still say nice things about those dominatrix boots of hers.

I'd feel exactly the same if DCPS were a white-run district, or run by Mexicans, or Martians, or gay Mormons on meth, or giant squirrels, whether black, brown, or albino.

I just feel that I have a right to call bullshit, incompetence, and waste when I see it, regardless of who is doing it. Calling me racist doesn't shut me up like it does so many. Or at least has in years past.

Sadly, people's unwillingness to call out bullshit on DCPS or try to help fix the system is in large part because of reactions like yours - we get called racist.

I wouldn't send my dirty socks to DC public schools.

I don't understand how girls that young are going to the upper school in DC and not the lower school in Bethesda. Aren't they in elementary school?

Even adjusting for cost of living, when you compare DC public schools to other urban school districts like LA, Chicago, or NYC, DC still spends more per student and consistenly scores in the bottom 5 percentile. It's not a factor overall expenditures; the majority of those costs are eaten up by court-mandated private schooling for special education students. DC taxpayers are basically paying for a third of the public school kids to go to private schools. They're not spending $15k per student; they're spending $12k per special ed student, $2k on the non-special-ed students, and $1k goes in the pocket of the DCPS HQ admin's Cayman Island Offshore holding company. If DCPS had a functioning special ed program, those costs might be substantially lower, assuming they didn't f**k it up eight ways to Sunday, which is how they got in this overpriced hot tranny mess in the first place. Maybe!

WestEnder:

You say learn Spanish to find a job, because native English speakers just can't seem to cut a break in the job market. Perhaps it's that they won't seem to get off their high horses about not doing menial labor.

It's not that immigrants are all stealing jobs that belong to American citizens. Rather, they are often taking jobs Americans refuse to do. Finding employment is about taking whatever job is available, not sitting around waiting for one that you deem good enough.

These "native English speakers have greater difficulty getting off the unemployment couch" would have no greater difficulty if they chose a less-than-ideal job over no job at all.