About La. Supt. John White’s Father, Peter A. White (And More)
In June 2017, FutureEd, “an independent think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy,” published this interview with Louisiana state superintendent John White.
In the interview, White pitched school vouchers by implying that he attended school via a particular kind of “voucher” as he hinted that since his father was a lawyer and could afford private school tuition:
…I think conservatives undermine what is a very legitimate moral case, a moral case that I happen to agree with, when they are averse to clear controls that allow serving every child, and that allow for a statistical base of evidence as to whether or not a school is a good school or not.On the left, I think that you have a greater moral hypocrisy. If you have a good school, they’re willing to serve all kids, they’re showing that they’re effective on the same tests as every other school is taking. What is your problem, at that point, with letting that family make the choice? That’s a particular brand of hypocrisy, given how many leaders on the left who advocate this position, have themselves or have had family members who are the beneficiaries of a private education. I got a private school voucher when I was a kid. It’s called the My Dad’s A Lawyer private school voucher. So it’s hard for me to understand how social liberals can square that fact with people of lesser means not being able to exercise the same liberties.
One of the big “ifs,” of course, involves the right of the private schools to make the first choice of not participating. And if the best private schools did participate, the cost alone would quickly break the public-tax-funded bank.
White attended St. Albans School (Washington, DC); the 2015-16 tuition without board was $41,000 (not including the one-time $1,850 registration fee). The school does offer need-based financial aid, with the average 2015-16 grant covering 68 percent of the tuition cost.
Furthermore, it isn’t as though private schools of the caliber of St. Albans are seeking to become part of the Louisiana voucher program, which, according to a 2017 report,has voucher students, after three years, at best breaking even with public school students on those ever-watched standardized tests.
But what particularly caught my attention in White’s “my dad’s a lawyer” voucher pitch is that he leveraged ever so small a tidbit about his own background in order to campaign for his desired reforms even as he actively conceals his family background from any published bio.
It’s as though John Charles White just dropped out of the sky, unparented and with only the sketchiest hints at his personal connections.
Thus, it was White’s “my dad’s a lawyer voucher” comment in that Georgetown University think tank interview that prompted me to begin researching his family background, a quest that resulted posts about his omitting his then-wife from years
