A story in the Daily Caller reports that at least seven of the forty-six Democrats who voted against the confirmation of pro-voucher Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos do not have firsthand experience of the heartbreak of having kids in failing public schools.

Minnesota Senator Al Franken, for example, who gave DeVos a particularly harsh grilling on testing in public schools, must have had excellent staff work to bone up on the subject. His kids won't be affected one way or the other, as they are enrolled the fancy Dalton School in New York (as the Caller notes, 1,018 miles from Minneapolis and 226 miles from Washington, D.C.)

It sounds idyllic for a big city school:

The cost of a single year of tuition for students in kindergarten through 12th grade at Dalton is $44,640. This amount, which represents slightly more than the average household income in the state of Alabama, is “among the lowest of our peer schools,” the posh Upper East Side school trumpets. On Friday, lunch at Dalton scrumptiously featured sustainable green tea salmon, anasazi bean salad, fresh organic papaya yogurt and a pasta bar with both marinara sauce and puttanesca sauce.

Dalton is most famous because its administration called off this year’s ice-skating party after a large group of parents refused to send their children to the Trump Wollman Rink in Central Park for political reasons.

But some of the senatorial class might be put off by the relative paucity of Hollywood progeny at Dalton. Not a problem for Senator Elizabeth Warren, who . . .  

. . . has a granddaughter who rubs shoulders with the children of movie stars at the trendy Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, California. Tuition at Harvard-Westlake costs $35,900 each year. There’s also a $2,000 fee for new students.

Harvard-Westlake offers a bevy of amazing opportunities for students including study-abroad programs in Spain, France, China, Italy and India. There’s also the Mountain School, “an independent semester program that provides high school juniors the opportunity to live and work on an organic farm in rural Vermont.”

Emma Willard alum Senator Kirsten Gillibrand economizes by sending her children to a local school not far from mummy's office. Her two children attend Capitol Hill Day School:

Tuition at the private, progressive bastion currently runs $30,300.00 per year for sixth through eighth grades, $28,700.00 per year for first through fifth grades and $28,000.00 per year for preschoolers.

Instruction in French and Spanish begins in preschool at Capitol Hill Day School. Also, performing arts is a big deal. There are “operas based on children’s books,” for example, and the sixth graders put on a musical theater production.

Other featured senators are Sheldon Whitehouse, Richard Blumenthal, Maggie Hassan and Bob Casey.

Don't get me wrong–I applaud these senators for selecting good schools at which to educate the next generation.

I just want low-income parents to be afforded some choice, too.

Education should not be a jealously-guarded privilege of the elites.

Let's spread it around, senators.