NEW YORK – It was only published yesterday, but Slate.com writer Allison Benedikt’s attack on private schools is already being called the single dumbest article about education ever written.

In her “manifesto” – titled “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person” – Benedikt accuses private schools and the families who use them of “ruining” public schools. She goes on to suggest parents have a “moral” obligation to make a “flesh-and-blood-offspring investment” in their neighborhood government school, even if it’s lousy and will end up harming their children’s future.

“I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental,” Benedikt writes. “But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.”

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Displaying a stunning ignorance about the power and motives of teacher unions, Benedikt explains that the super-involved parents (who formerly sent their children to private school) would “do everything” within their power to improve the lousy public school.

“And parents have a lot of power,” Benedikt asserts. “In many underresourced schools, it’s the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administration’s face when a teacher is falling down on the job.”

(Before making such a statement, Benedikt should ask a highly involved parent like Gwen Samuel how much power parents have over school rules that are dictated by the teacher union contract.)

Most of Benedikt’s fire is directed at the affluent parents who use private school to give their children an advantage in a competitive world. But she’s just as critical of parents who choose private schools for religious reasons, or because their child has special behavioral or learning needs.

“None of these are compelling reasons” for families to avoid their moral duty of fully supporting the local government school, Benedikt writes. After all, “there’s more to education than what’s taught.”

Public schools offer important “life preparation” by exposing children to diverse people and backgrounds, Benedikt says.

‘Jaw-droppingly dumb’

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The foolishness and naiveté of Benedikt’s arguments proved too much to take for Joe Carter, an editor with the Acton Institute.

In his wonderfully titled blog – “The Dumbest Article about Private Schools You’ll Ever Read” – Carter explains that Benedikt inadvertently exposes the moral bankruptcy of today’s Education Establishment.

“However misguided their aims, there was one a time when progressives worked to protect the welfare and improve the lot of the individual,” Carter writes.

“Today, the goal of many progressives is to protect the welfare and improve the lot of public bureaucracies” – teacher unions – even if that means harming the education and futures of generations of children, Carter argues.

“While Benedikt’s article is jaw-droppingly dumb … it does reveal what many progressives believe: Children belong to the state, not their parents. If public schools are inferior then the children must receive an inferior education, all for the good of the state-run schools.”

At one point, Carter wonders if Benedikt’s article isn’t some sort of prank to show the hollowness of the anti-school choice crowd.

“Sadly, that is not the case. The article is the product of someone who really believes this is a reasonable argument for public school education – and a prime example of the type of substandard thinkers that our public schools are producing,” Carter concludes.

A new spin on an old, discredited idea

While Benedikt’s Slate.com article has become an Internet sensation, the ideas in it aren’t exactly new.

Beyond the obvious influence of Karl Marx (sacrificing the needs of the individual for the benefit of the collective), Benedikt is actually echoing recent arguments from other brash, pro-public school progressives.

Speaking at the Occupy Department of Education protest last April, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis offered this assessment of the school choice movement:

“The problem is we are in times when people who believe that the market is always right … The market always has a solution for the problems. Now the problem with that is when you look at market solutions for schooling problems and certainly publicly funded public education, then what you start looking at is that you raise up the level of the individual. So it’s just what my individual kid needs, not what’s good for kids, but what my kid needs. So then they come up with the idea of [school] choice. … ”

Lewis made those comments about the same time MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry said this:

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of ‘These are our children.’ So part of it is, we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”

These comments seem to represent a new approach for public school apologists. For years, they denied that government schools were nearly as bad as they were being portrayed by reformers. Instead, they blamed students’ lousy test scores on unfair and unwarranted testing practices.

These government school apologists have obviously concluded that argument isn’t selling with the public, so they’ve changed tactics. Now, they’re actually embracing the awfulness of some public schools and are using it to justify their calls for ever-greater levels of K-12 “investment” and to argue against school choice.

Interestingly, the nation’s most visible teacher union leaders – AFT President Rhonda “Randi” Weingarten and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel – haven’t publicly embraced Benedikt’s article, at least not as of Friday morning.

Perhaps they’re waiting to see how people react to Benedikt’s militant approach. If it polls well, so to speak, they’ll take that as a license to finally get honest about their left-wing, socialist agenda.

But if most Americans agree with Carter that the education article is one of the dumbest ever written, then they’ll probably continue posing as moderates who favor a “balanced” and “collaborative” approach to K-12 reform.