Dear Ms. Reiter,

Thank you for the interesting and valuable interview. To be honest, I saw the headline and wondered if this would be like the last Salon interview I read (quite markedly, the questions were all as long as the answers, and we began to wonder who the interviewer r-e-a-l-l-y wanted to talk to and about....).

In any case, thank you again.

Great article.

Sincerely,

david Terry

...or are people in L.A. really so out of touch and afraid of the poor that they've literally never been in a public school? Does Salon's editorial staff realize that this article literally will not make sense to 95% of the rest of the country? Sometimes I think that this site is written almost entirely for rich women who live in S.F. and L.A. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of effort to move beyond that demographic anymore.

My son attended an expensive private Montessori program last year. Beautiful school, set on acres of land, active parent association, parent-written newsletters, the whole works. My kid hated it. It just wasn't for him, for a variety of reasons.

So, after looking at schools that would likely cause us to give up every family vacation and most of our decent meals for the next 12 years, I gave up and decided to send him to public kindergarten and grade school. They're good schools. And, unlike the Montessori program, whose principal I never met, the public school principal gave me a personal tour of the school and answered all my questions.

It's still scary, though. My main impetus for going private was the look of the middle school with its temporary classroom trailers sitting in the parking lot, and the high school with metal detectors in the entrance. As much as I want to support the public system, it can be a scary place. As a mom, I want my child to feel save, and some of these schools don't feel or look safe to me.

As for now, I'm happy to go public school and pray that the next presidential administration does some drastic things to improve public education.

...is my favorite of all the alumni from my alma mater.

It's good to know that a Caltech physics degree can trade in for work on NPR. And this interview just goes to show that rational thought really is the way to go...

Private, public, charter, gifted, homeschooling....for my three kids, so I appreciate Amy's investigation of schools, looking for a good fit for her children.

Something she never brings up is the elephant in the room. Colleges of education routinely attract the lowest-quality high school students on every measure--GPA, test scores, essay writing, extracurriculars, leadership, you name it. This is the market at work. The cream of the crop go into medicine and law and engineering. Or maybe the humanities, where they end up teaching at universities.

It goes without saying that there are many exceptions--dedicated, smart people working in the service of children and their intellectual development--but frankly there are not enough.

I work in schools as a substitute teacher in mostly urban areas in Cleveland. Some schools are poorer than others, and I work with diverse populations (although every school I work at is not necessarily diverse). The behavior and intelligence of most of the young teachers I work with is appalling on every level. I could write a book on it (and probably will). The conversations in the faculty lounges are inane blather about the latest reality show if they're not mocking students or their parents.

The particular system I work in is perhaps not representative, as many of the public school teachers in my own upper middle class suburb are warm, intelligent boomer women. Nevertheless, even there, where I have worked on the inside, compliance is king. Students who want to figure things out for themselves, who ask a lot of questions, or who point out inconsistencies in textbooks or curricular content are considered bad in some way, and there is truly never an opportunity for the teachers to seize a teachable moment for fear of not covering testable material.

Private schools are able to circumvent some of the problems by opting out of some of the testing and choosing teachers who pursued graduate education in the field of study (say, Biology or English) rather than Education/licensure. (For all you parents who fall sucker to the private schools who brag that all their teachers are certified, you are getting a raw deal. Far better that your child's history teacher know history than know the latest techniques of "classroom management"--read: child control.)

There's really too much to say here, but I'm thrilled that Amy is interested in starting a discussion and even volunteering her generation to take on the issue. She needs to look at Finland and France and other places where the integrity of the education is a priority over obedience, where they value independent, rigorous scientific thinking, where the government trains the teachers in content and sends them to the children only AFTER the training, rather than the practice here of having almost all of the teachers going back for further educational classes WHILE they are taking on the herculean job of educating our kids.

One small point of disagreement: On the diversity thing, suburban schools are completely homogeneous. My children who attend public school are in classrooms with children who are all white and upper class. The one who goes downtown to the Jesuit school has a far greater diversity in every way, not only b/c the Jesuits make it a priority to offer scholarships to the local kids, but also b/c the school draws from all over Cleveland. Many private schools offer financial aid.

I'm not advocating private schools. Some are better, most have the opportunity to do things a little differently (although they do not actually have more money per student), but a surprising number simply mimic the public schools. Mostly, they are simply unaffordable for people.

This is a complex issue that deserves a lot of attention.