CV NEWS FEED // Stacy Davis Gates is an outspoken critic of school choice and serves as the leader of one of the nation’s most controversial teachers unions. Now she is facing scrutiny after it was discovered that she sends her own child to a private Catholic school.
Faced with accusations of hypocrisy, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president is defending the “very difficult decision” she made to give her son the benefits of a private education.
“It was a very difficult decision for us because there is not a lot to offer black youth who are entering high school,” Davis Gates said in an interview with WBEZ, Chicago’s National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate:
In many of our schools on the South Side and the West Side, the course offerings are very marginal and limited. Then the other thing, and it was a very strong priority, was his ability to participate in co-curricular and extracurricular activities, which quite frankly, don’t exist in many of the schools, high schools in particular.
In March of last year, Davis Gates stated “I’m also a mother. My children go to Chicago Public Schools. These are the things that legitimize my space within the coalition.”
The fervent school choice opponent called the news report on her son attending a private school “doxing,” “violent,” and “unacceptable.”
“We live in a time with extremist political rhetoric, and it has led to violence,” Davis Gates said. “My children, my family should not have to endure this.”
“It needs to be rejected and decried by every institutional leader,” she added.
SubX.News, the media outlet that broke the story, also published a picture and the name of Davis Gates’ son.
The Daily Wire’s Mairead Elordi noted that Davis Gates “has been vocal about her opposition to school choice and private schools, even going as far as saying school choice is ‘racist.’”
Elordi pointed to an August 2022 post on X (then known as Twitter) in which the teachers union president called school choice “actually the choice of racists.” She claimed that “It was created to avoid integrating schools with Black children.”
Davis Gates was responding to John McClorey, a retired Chicago firefighter who had called school choice “the civil rights struggle of our generation.” McClorey had argued that “keeping poor children of color trapped in failing public schools is inherently racist.”
Elordi also noted that Davis Gates “strongly opposed the Illinois Invest in Kids program, which offers tax credits to people who help fund scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools.”
Dylan Sharkey, an assistant editor for the Illinois Policy Institute, posed the following question:
If the teachers union leader who wants to kill school choice has made the private school choice for her own child, how convincing are her arguments against school choice for low-income children with few options for breaking the cycle of generational poverty?
Read more: 8 Politicians Who Attacked School Choice But Went To Private School Themselves (Or Sent Their Kids)
