"I have no problems with private schools. I graduated from one and so did my mother. Private schools are useful and we often use public funds to pay for their infrastructures and other common needs"
About this Quote
Clyburn opens with a prophylactic: “I have no problems with private schools.” It’s the rhetorical equivalent of showing your ID before someone asks. In today’s education fights, where “school choice” has become a proxy war over race, class, and public institutions, he knows any critique of private-school subsidies can be miscast as hostility to parents or religion. So he inoculates himself with biography: he’s not an outsider throwing stones; he’s a graduate, and his mother’s history extends that credibility across generations.
The real payload lands in the quieter second half: private schools aren’t just “useful,” they’re already entangled with the state. “We often use public funds to pay for their infrastructures and other common needs” reframes the debate from ideology to accounting. The subtext is: stop pretending there’s a clean moral line between “private” virtue and “public” waste. If taxpayers are underwriting buildings, buses, safety services, or facilities, then private schools are already beneficiaries of collective investment, even if they reserve the right to select students, shape curricula, and remain less publicly accountable.
As a longtime Democratic leader, Clyburn is threading a needle. He’s not mounting an abolitionist case against private education; he’s challenging the one-way street where public dollars flow without public obligations. It’s a pragmatic argument dressed as personal neutrality, aimed at voters skeptical of culture-war absolutism but receptive to the fairness question: if the public is paying, what does the public get back?
The real payload lands in the quieter second half: private schools aren’t just “useful,” they’re already entangled with the state. “We often use public funds to pay for their infrastructures and other common needs” reframes the debate from ideology to accounting. The subtext is: stop pretending there’s a clean moral line between “private” virtue and “public” waste. If taxpayers are underwriting buildings, buses, safety services, or facilities, then private schools are already beneficiaries of collective investment, even if they reserve the right to select students, shape curricula, and remain less publicly accountable.
As a longtime Democratic leader, Clyburn is threading a needle. He’s not mounting an abolitionist case against private education; he’s challenging the one-way street where public dollars flow without public obligations. It’s a pragmatic argument dressed as personal neutrality, aimed at voters skeptical of culture-war absolutism but receptive to the fairness question: if the public is paying, what does the public get back?
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|
More Quotes by Jim
Add to List
