Some serious introspection on the part of the American public is needed before our public education system can ever function again.

The question we need to be asking is: why did we do this to ourselves? Sarah Hepola's commentary is right on, except in one respect. She walks up to, but won't enter, the issue of who made all the bad decisions in the first place that led to the travesty of an education system we have now.

It was us.

That much we know: for the past 35 years or so the effort to kill education in America has had wide popular support. That sort of thing isn't easy — it took a long time to do and required a sustained effort on the part of the general public over many years. It seems crucial to understand why we as a people, or at least a majority of us, have been working so hard to make this happen.

So what were we thinking? Was it white people of the Archie Bunker generation poisoning their own well so they wouldn't have to share it with minorities? Were we infected by right-wing propaganda? Was it the Baby Boom turning empty-nest and deciding that they didn't want to be paying school taxes anymore? Dual income families losing their grip on their children's welfare? What?

These are questions that I don't yet see answered anywhere (though if I'm wrong I'd love to know). The people of Massachussetts are making a committed effort to restore some semblance of a functional public education system, taxes and all, and it's starting to work — but progress is slow and fitful.

Without some serious introspection, which we as a people are unfortunately not terribly good at, it only seems inevitable that we'll go back to our downward spiral again.

If parents must--or assume they must--send their children to private school in order for them to receive a good education, we have to admit that the American experiment has failed. If only those with means can provide decent schooling for their kids, we no longer have a democratic society of equal opportunity, but a two-tiered (or more) nation where opportunity is prescribed or proscribed, respectively, according to one's class. If the American experiment is to be resuscitated, it is crucial that our public schools be saved, and that quality education once again be made available to all children.

The article also mentions status as a prime reason parents choose private schools--on Manhattan school placement service says many parents feel that "anything will do as long as it's private." My children all attend urban public schools in a district so bad that it went into receivership a while back. Parents we know in the suburbs have occasionally recoiled in horror when they find out our kids attend city schools. But one goes to a Montessori charter (where there are 3 full time teachers in a class of 25), one attends a math and science magenet, and the third is in an International Baccalaureate high school--a program also offered by a local private school with a $25,000 price tag. Why do these public school options exist? Because parents like us stay in the system and demand them, which then makes these programs available for all children. Magnets and charters are not a perfect solution and carry their own race and class baggage, but our children attend fully race/class integrated programs AND receive an excellent education at no additional cost to us. We sleep well at night.

My husband and I send our tween to a private school. It was a wrenching decision, but after sending her to public school for her kindergarten and first grade years, and finding the class size (33) and school order untenable, we did what we thought fit our family. Like those profiled in the NYT article, our financial picture has changed, primarily due to a new baby, and the recession.

We have applied to magnet public schools for her, and are waiting to hear. But we won't necessarily jump ship if she does get into the "good" public schools- it is a hard transition to go from the rolling green of a Princeton-like private school, to the harder-edged factory-model feel of most public schools in our city. There is much to be said for the sense of confidence, the right to think outside of the box, and the feeling of safety that the private school has given her child.

However, as products of public schools (albeit in suburban areas) my husband and I do hope that this country begins to have real conversations about what it means to educate children. And I really feel that it is those of us who have experienced both the public and private educational settings, through our children and personally, who are best primed to have a conversation without the polarization of class politics, but with the compassion needed to prevent all children from getting left behind.

Education is more about family involvement than dollars and cents. There is no amount of money we can dump into inner city schools to make up for the fact that most of the kids are being raised by single moms. If you look at cost per student, many of the worst performing schools are spending more money than better performing schools. Parental involvement is what is needed....but unfortunately, single parent households will continue to not be able to meet these requirements. It's time for feminism to recognize what everybody else already knows.

I've taught at an upper East Side school where the parents paid more per semester in tuition than I made. I've also taught at a Baltimore urban school. I've also taught college, both public and private. I've watched NCLB invade even the college curriculum with its statistical idols and its belief in method over content.

The primary difference between public and private is the ability to say "no." Private schools, even where it is an illusion, send the message to the students that they are at school at sufferance, not as suffering. As public schools became obligatory rites of containment and passage, the public's own view of them ceased to be attentive and turned, instead, lazy and spiteful. A discipline case must be allowed to stay, and a student without success is the fault of the teacher. When student bodies as a whole fail to succeed, the teachers are sent for training, not the students.

Oddly enough, the glory years of America (always 50-100 years ago) saw students educated, despite those teachers not having the latest assessment data. Strangely, other nations educate their children without filling out triplicate lesson plans filed at the regional office and the teachers themselves forced to take two semesters of "how to create a lesson plan."

The ability to eject a student is important, just as using that power is dreadful. The ability to put the stress back on the student to attend voluntarily makes the private school able to push harder and achieve more. The ability of teachers to learn their content in college, instead of learning method, method, method, and more method for assessing method's methodological statistical output, is vital. A teacher who knows her content can devise new experiments, new explanations, and can fill in a textbook's gaps, while one ground between the millstones of methodology can only move, crablike, sideways.

The ability to tell students to get tutoring, to urge parents to ensure the child's work, to say, "This is something you want, not something you endure," is paramount as well. If we want the public schools to achieve at the rate of private schools, we need the ability to select. Until we solve that paradox, parents will feel the need to pay, and paying will itself act as that redistribution of power and realignment of expectations. It's dreadful that this is the case.