Give Chelsea Room to Find Her Own Way

We didn’t see much of Chelsea Clinton during the presidential campaign and when we did, she’d usually be standing next to Mom on some stage, swaying a bit awkwardly, grinning intermittently, seemingly concentrating on how to act.

I imagined her talking to a girlfriend the next day on the phone. She’s be saying something like, “God, I felt so dumb . Did I look all right?”

Of course, Mom and Dad would have already told their daughter that she did just fine, as she always does, and that the important thing is to relax and be yourself.

Bill and Hillary have made a big deal of telling people that they want the youngest Clinton, enrolled in an integrated public school in Little Rock, to lead the life of a regular kid.

And as any well-adjusted grown-up can tell you, that means having the freedom to go through your own adolescent version of hell.

(Thinking back on my own eighth-grade experience, highlights that spring to mind include standing around with my girlfriends at some sock hop, our skin mottled by a strobe light, as the music of, say, the Archies--”Ah, Honey, Ah, Sugar, Sugar. . .”--drowned out any insightful conversation we might be having about the pimples we could feel forming on our chins.)

I bring all this up because amid the controversy over the Clintons’ choice of a private Washington school for their 12 year-old daughter, nobody’s talking too much about Chelsea herself.

This is a delicate time, a blessedly short interlude between childhood and pretend adult. Given some limited choices, shouldn’t she have the right to decide where she wants to go to school?

Instead, conservatives are busy gloating about presidential hypocrisy and liberals are acting hurt and betrayed. Opportunities are said to have been missed, symbols tarnished a bit.

Many parents, however, see something else.

In announcing that Chelsea will be attending the Quaker-run Sidwell Friends school (annual tuition: $10,700), Clinton spokesman George Stephanopoulos said that she was “deeply involved in the decision-making process.”

And my guess is that’s the truth.

Chelsea and her mother visited Sidwell--the only D.C. school so honored--and talked to students and teachers. They liked it. It felt right.

Perhaps other schools within commuting distance of the White House, including public ones, might have eventually felt that way to the Clintons too. But that misses the point.

On the day that “Chelsea Does Sidwell” was making network news, a TV reporter interviewed a mother who sends her son to a public junior high where she stressed that Chelsea could have received a good education too.

The woman, who was white, was clearly miffed about the Clintons’ choice. Disappointed was the word I think she used.

Well, I am too. I’m disappointed that the quality of the public schools in this country seems to vary according to the income of the public that sends their kids there.

I’m disappointed that a 12-year-old girl should be expected to sacrifice her choice of education for the political fortunes of her father.

I’m disappointed that we are a nation fixated on symbols instead of on kids.

Yes, there are exceptions in this gloom. Bill Clinton mentioned one of them when he was stumping for his new job.

He told an audience in Toledo, Ohio, last fall of a junior high school in inner-city Chicago where the parents, teachers and kids aren’t letting poverty and crime teach them how to fail. He reported that the school has a dress code, high test scores, no dropouts, and lots of parent volunteers.

Alas, it remains just another symbol, stopped right there. What we need are symbols with legs. Tokens are of limited use. “Why can’t they do it everywhere?” Clinton asked his Toledo audience back then.

Clinton spokesman Stephanopoulos said in his news conference that the Clintons have not rejected the public schools by choosing to send Chelsea someplace else. That’s spin control, of course, transparent and a joke.

All good parents simply want the best for their child. The district’s public schools, by many independent measures, would mean less than that in many respects. The Clintons said as much in their brief statement about Chelsea and Sidwell, but only Stephanopoulos was left to elaborate as best he could.

What the Clintons should do is just come clean. No, unlike millions of middle-class Americans they didn’t choose their new neighborhood for the schools. But there is nothing wrong with that. It’s called putting the kids first.

What’s wrong with this picture is that millions of Americans find that they can’t, no matter how much they love their kids. And all Americans suffer for that.