Dianne Abbott is a hypocrite?

Reading Swift’s article, clearly she is a hypocrite then, since she told Blair he was wrong for doing what she has done.

More interestingly, is Swift right that it is not hypocritical to want the abolition of independent schools yet still send your children to them if you think not doing so will fail to increase social justice? Perhaps he is. Unfortunately, the issue in Britain is that enough people have a vested interest in maintaining independent schools to make their abolition politically impossible. There is certainly something wrong with a system in which 7% of the population are able to hijack the chances of 93%. I think it’s called a first past the post voting system.

Let me add that Diane Abbott was right to call herself a hypocrite, and being a Cambridge graduate, as well as the author in the past of several disparaging remarks made to those who have tred the very same path to which she is presently committing herself, she has both the intellect and the standing to know best whether or not what she preached was in keeping with her avowed credo. There is nothing here to defend, and anybody who insists on doing so regardless is engaging in empty sophistry.

I disagree with Abiola. I think Swift is right that you can have contradictory preferences if the contexts for having those preferences are different. One is a political/public choice for particular conditions and the other is a personal/private choice given particular (different) conditions.

My friend Gus diZerega likes to cite an informal classroom exercise that Mark Sagoff reports in The Economy of the Earth.

He would ask his students whether they would visit a ski resort that was proposed for the wild Mineral King valley in California. When they would nod their heads with a yes, he would ask them whether they thought it should be built. Most would then nod sideways rather than up and down.

They’re not necessarily being hippocritical here.

Yet, knowing nothing about ed policy issues in the UK, I wonder why inadequate funding of the publicly-funded schools (and their poor state) should be blamed on the independent schools.

“So for a parent to do what he can to make sure that his children get the best possible education goes against “equality of opportunity””

Indeed it does. That this is clearly counter-intuitive to you gets to the crux of the problem. It is not irrational or surprising for a parent to do everything in their power to give their child an advantage in life. At the same time it is seen as unfair that my child should be disadvantaged just because I happen to be a lecturer rather than a merchant banker and have the corresponding salary.

Many people have the intuition that it is somehow fair or just that your chances in life are not determined by the wealth of your parents. If this is accepted then it must also be accepted that schooling, which plays such an enormous part in the development of all people, should be available to all.

It should be noted that countries without private schools routinely do better in international comparisons than those with them. Britain does okay as it happens but the US does very poorly indeed. Furthermore, performance in the UK and the US is very closely tied to class whereas in countries without private schools this is much less evident.

jdsm,

I don’t really want to argue with you but just some clarifications:

“It’s not inadequate funding that’s the problem. No mor is spent per pupil in the UK than in Finland, yet Finnish children routinely do much better. The argument is that creaming off lots of gifted students adversely impacts those left in the normal schools. International comparisons seem to bare this out.”

I was just responding to what Swift seemed to be saying — that Abbott can’t blamed because the public-funded schools (in disadvantaged areas) are inadequate and that is because they are underfunded.

Also, he used the phrase “creaming off affluent children and their parents”. Did you also mean that, or do you really mean ‘gifted’ children — of which there surely will be many among the poorer communities.

man, have you been to Mineral King? it’d have some great slopes, assuming the snow sticks (I’ve only been there in the summer).

that said, building up that valley would be a crime. an ugly, ugly crime. I completely understand the students who would ski once the crime was a sunk cost, but would oppose its commission.

http://www.faultline.org/place/2002/02/mineralking1.html

It is not just about some abstract giftedness, it is about understanding the value of academic success, knowing how to work, not being considered odd if you choose to study, parents who know how a school ought to be run and who know how to complain when things are wrong and “the soft bigotry of low expectations”.

It must also be about the failure of the state system to provide an adequate alternative. It is far from a universal feature of state education. For Parisians for example private schools are for the less gifted children of rich parents unable ot enter a top lycee or say Hunter Colege High School in Manhattan. Even in Hackney it wasn’t always like that. Hackney Downs Grammar School turned out Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker and two Nobel Laureates (and Michael Caine). The success and demographics of Henrietta Barnett School also provide an example.

I think the shame is that Dianne Abbott is not sending her son to a Hackney School, turning up there when it isn’t doing what it ought to be, calling people she knows when it isn’t working, sitting on the board of governors and so on. If she doesn’t who will. The racial statistics in the article are dangerously incomplete — she should look at the performance of the children of wealthy Cambridge graduates in the area to. Or look at the comparison between largely middle class and entrepreneurial indian and east african asians with largely working class bengalis and pakistanis (at opposite ends of the spectrum acdemically and financially but identical in the eyes bigots) or between carribean and african children in the UK where africans do much better reversing the position in the US where carribeans do better than african americans.

On the other hand there are many situations where behaviour that I would like prohibited would appeal to me personally for example I’m against trading in human organs from live donors but if somoene close to me could only be saved by buying a kidney from a poor Indian say, I would certainly think about it, genetic engineering of humans is another. Is hypocrisy the same as doing something that you would rather you didn’t have to or even would rather other people didn’t. Education is also difficult for Lord Farquaad reasons, the cost of standing up for a principle are born by someone else.

In conclusion I don’t really think hypocrisy is the issue but her decision is disappointing and I will be interested to see what she is doing to make sure that her constituents have the opportunity to receive an education she finds acceptable. I hope it is quite heroic.

Just a brief comment on what Chris says about compormising the privacy of one’s children. Doesn’t it depend rather on the particular reasons? I know a number of lefties in the US who send their kids to private schools (by ‘lefty’ I mean people who would regard both Chris and Dianne Abbott as wishy washy liberals), and do so without any embarrassment, because they live in cities where they regard most of the public (state) schools as inadequate for pretty much any child — if they had the money they’d pull all the kids out (though, wierdly, they typically oppose voucher schemes evenfor low-income kids). If that is your reason it is sufficiently non-child-specific that revealing it does not compromise the child’s privacy, surely. And if that is Abbott’s reason, then why shouldn’t she make a big deal of it?

That said, as soon as one is talking about one’s own actions and reasons one has muddied the waters of any public debate, so it is hard to be taken seriously. But, just to say, massive numbers of middle-class people who are entirely unembarrassed about commenting on these things deploy quality-of-local-school considerations in their house purchasing decisions, which is (in my view) no more or less problematic than going private (Swift, I’m pretty sure, thinks it is less problematic, but not much less). The difference is just that these calculations are invisible to the public.

(Disclosure: My own situation is a little odd: my house is in the catchment area of the high school which is popularly regarded as the ‘best’ local high school, public or private, and many of my neighbours are middle class moderate lefties who bought houses here to get their kids into that school, but fiercely oppose private schools and vouchers for low-income kids. I, however, distrust popular judgements about school quality, and am very nervous about having my kids go to that school in particular. If we’re still here when the time comes (not for quite a while) I shall try hard to find a more socio-economically mixed school for them, depending, of course, on what I judge to be their own individual needs).

‘How is it “hijacking the chances” of anyone else if I choose to use the money I’ve earned by the sweat of my brow to send my children to the schools I prefer?’

I’m glad to see, then, that Abiola Lapite believes that inherited and other forms of unearned wealth should not be used to send children to expensive elite schools. This will rather cut down the market, however.

I don’t think Blair is the first PM to have his children educated in the state system. I’m fairly sure Wilson’s two sons went to state (or county) grammar schools. Wilson didn’t have the money for private schools, did he? Margaret Callaghan probably went to a state school too, for similar reason.
I found Adam Swift’s argument a bit odd – as I read it, he thought it was all right to remove your child from a school system that was crap, but not OK to send the child to a school that was academically excellent. So sending the child to a mediocre private school would be OK. It’d take real disinterest to do that..

Not unless a great many other things happened also. I certainly wouldn’t want to force everyone into a state-provided one-size-fits-all model. What we ought to be aspiring towards is a system where every child gets an education appropriate to its needs irrespective of its parents’ ability to pay. That’s consistent with there being a wide diversity of education providers and with parents having a lot of choice about where their kids go. Currently parents have very little choice (despite rhetoric to the contrary) except if they are willing to (a) pay, or (b) to move house or if they (c) either have or are willing to fake (yes lots of that goes on) religious commitments.

Jack,

many of the factors you cite that harm state schools are (if only partly) attributable to the existence of privates. If the welathy could not opt out they would accept or even lobby for higher taxes to pay higher teachers’ salaries; private schools would not be draining off academically talented teachers from the state system; parental attitudes might be more supportive of learning, etc. I agree that the state schools could be better even as things stand, though probably not without increased funding and changed funding arrangements.

Also, as Chris emphasised, there are lots of reasons for regarding a school as inadequate for one’s own child. One is that it is inadequate for any child, and ifthat is Abbott’s view she should say so — I don’t see why her constituents should blame her for that. Or she might (as Swift hypothesizes) worry about the way state schools serve black boys in particular. Or she might worry that her kid is particularly prone to bullying. Or another parent might simply want to separate siblings — this is a common reason for going private with one kid who is perceived, often, as less academic, and not wanted to be in competititon with the shining sibling (who remains inthe state school). Many parents want to separate their kid froma particular friend or friends — this, again, is a common reason for selecting one school rather than another, or lobbying for changed classrooms. Anyway, absent detailed knowledge of Abbott’s situation, neither we nor her constitutents have reason to sneer — and it is quite proper of her to refuse to violate her son’s privacy.
Though, of course, one hopes she has privately apologised to Blair and Harman.

Dave,
you are right about Swift’s position and about its demandingness. I think its the right position myself. But I also suspect that she has done exactly what he proposes, because I suspect (from talking to parents whose children have attended that school) that unless something big has changed it is just a very expensive merely adequate school. Certainly, if I had boys,had no compunction about going private, had the money, and lived in London, it would be very low on my list.

I am not sure that Harry is right to be quite so dismissive of City of London. I know a fourteen-year old now in his third year there who is extremely bright, revels in being in environment where being bright is not an instant route to social annihalation (though CoL is far from perfect there), is being stretched by some impressive-sounding teachers and is deep in a rich musical life.
The qualities or otherwise of CoL as a school are in one sense irrelevant to the discussion, but the implication that Abbott has made some kind of frying pan to fire decision seems to me wrong.
And for what it is worth, I think Abbott has put herself in an undefensible position, not because of what she has done now (with which I have considerable sympathy having faced a version of the same decision myself), but because of her loud and self-righteous criticism of Blair, Harman and others who faced those decisions before her.

Harry,

Thanks. That makes things clearer.

Your proposal (lotteries + no payments) is worth considering. Though I can’t say I’m convinced. I’d definitely have checked your book out if I had access to a good university library at the present time. But I don’t. :-(

It seems to me that there still is a lot of potential for social injustice in such a system — only that it won’t be class-based.

But something for me think about.

“the short version is this: in principle there’s nothing wrong with abolishing privates”

Why exactly is there nothing wrong with this “in principle”? If party A chooses to pay party B to educate his child, what gives anyone the right to prevent the two parties from coming to an agreement?

This notion of yours is an extremely illiberal one, I must say – as a left-winger, you probably believe that a woman has a right to do as she pleases with her fetus well past the time when it would be viable, but once the child is born, you’d seek to deprive her of the right to educate it as she chooses? Where is the intellectual coherence in that? And if you prize “equality” so much that you’d strip parents of the freedom to educate their children at establishments of their own preference, why not go the whole hog, and handicap those who are “unfairly” privileged by the genetic lottery with superior intellectual abilities? Why not just have a Handicapper-General and be done with it?

The only conclusion I can draw is that you and those who support your stance are enemies of freedom. In the name of a fetish you call “equality” you’d gladly strip the rest of your fellow men of all choice in their lives, refusing to acknowledge that there is only one place in which all men are fully equal in this world, and that is the grave. Have you learnt nothing from the human tragedies set in motion by communism, or are the aspirations of your fellow men to live their lives as they please of so little weight in your thinking that you believe the state justified in frustrating them?

Gregg,
That last revelation is amazing. Where did you get it from?

Chirag,
my wife has a reprehensible practice of buying books, lookiung them over without breaking the spine, and then taking them back for a refund. Not suggesting you do this, especially to my book, but…

On privates in the US versus the UK: I think that in the UK they make a significant contribution to, and are not merely a symptom of, educational inequality (though they are also a symptom of an unjustly unequal society). Here’s two startling contrasts
1. The average cost of a UK prviate is about double the average per-pupil spending in state schools (rolling into the later figure all the costs of LEA and DfES bureaucracy); the average cost of a US private school is HALF the average per-pupil spending in US state schools.
2. Per pupil spending in the UK state schools with the highest concentration of low-income kids is about double per pupil spending in UK (state) schools with the lowest concentrations of low icnome kids; even within most US States per-pupil spending in the school districts with the highest-income kids is between 2 and 4 times the per-pupil spending in the districts with the lowest income kids (there are exceptions — CA, VT, ect — But even Wisconsin, my own state, which is one of the egalitarian midwestern states, spends about double the amount on wealthy kids as on poor kids).

In many districts (in the US) it is the case that if you want your kid to attend a school with a socio-economic mix which roughly mirrors that of the city you live in, the only way you can come close to achieving that is by opting for a lowish-cost private school, typically a religious one.

The lesson: wealthy suburban state schools in the US perform roughly the function that mostof the private sector in the UK performs — conferring advantage on the children of the anxious and wealthy middle class, and keeping them separate form the rest. [IN both countries the REAL elite are probably served by the most expensive schools in the private sector (Eton, Winchester etc in the UK, Choate, St Albans etc in the US) — the kind of schools that Oliver Letwin, Al Gore, and Jesse Jackson prefer for their kids, while the latter two do their utmost to prevent poor kids having any option other than low-spending inner city schools].

The lesson: in the US it is the public (state) school system that must be the central target of any efforts to get educational justice; int he UK the private sector is a reasonable target.

Abiola,
I sense from your tone that you don’t really want a reply; I could give one but it would take us far into political philosophy, further than I feel like going now. I wouldn’t, though, make assumptions about your views about abortion on the basis of anything about the legitimacy or toherwise of private schooling, and am surprised that you feel so confident about my views.

I’d strongly recommend resisting the impulse to attribute views to others they haven’t actually expressed. I’m guilty of it on occasion (“You might think..” or “You probably think…”), but usually when I do it I try to restrict it to humor.

I’m on the opposite side of many issues with Mr. Lapite, but I still think his combination of opinions and his reasoning is interesting. I enjoy reading what he has to say. A lot of people have influenced my opinions whom I didn’t see eye to eye with. Good grief, most of my econ professors fall into that category! But that didn’t stop me from learning a lot from them.

I went to CLS (on a scholarship), and I am a constituent of Dianne Abbott. I’m also a Labour Party member. Although Dianne is a fairly lazy MP, I support her decision to send her son to my old school, which was a very good one indeed from my recollection.

I do feel for Dianne. At least he’s not planning to become a rapper like the daughter of the man who is said by some outrageous gosspimongers to have fathered Dianne’s son … but obviously I don’t want to be sued for libel, so I’ll say no more.