I live in San Francisco. Every year our newspaper publishes articles about the agonizing school choices the shrinking number of middle class parents here face. We aren't having to choose between Starbucks and Costco; our concerns aren't trivial problems with lighting and unsmiling receptionists. Our underfunded urban schools are in buildings many decades old, needing major and constant repair. Crumbling walls, crumbling ceilings, inadequate heat or no heat at all (and yes it gets cold enough for students to sit through schooldays in coats and gloves), flooding, filthy bathrooms. In some classrooms, during rainstorms teachers have to rearrange desks around buckets on the floor. Elementary schools with playyards the size of some suburban driveways. At one of the best elementary schools the principal told me kids were allowed to stand outdoors for recess but not run; the small size of the yard made running too dangerous. Instead, three times a week they were given a half hour inside a trailer outfitted with mini-trampolines. The schools are overcrowded -- but overcrowding isn't just a problem of the teacher not being able to give individual time to a student, time a parent could theoretically make up. Overcrowding engenders tension, anger, bullying, violence, sexual harassment, sexual assault --I don't say that because I've watched Michelle Pfeiffer movies, I am speaking from lived experience. I visited over a dozen public elementary schools and in every one the teacher spent huge chunks of time on discipline problems exacerbated by the sheer number of kids in a space too small to contain their energies. Add this lost time up over hours, days, years. And the difficulties teachers face with children with special needs don't involve only the disabled. Recently a team of psychologists visited our lowest-performing elementary schools and determined that an overwhelming percentage of the children suffered from PTSD due to their chaotic lives and neighborhoods -- they said no realistic teaching or learning could occur until people worked with these children to resolve issues of security and trust. I am sure that in the kindergarten year these problems don't seem large -- but they become much more complicated issues as the children get older.

Private schools pose different problems. I did choose private school for my daughter and had to deal with her developing unrealistic expectations about what we could afford, had to be sure she saw and understood the vast disparities of wealth and privilege in the U.S. There were times I was furious at something she repeated that she'd heard at school. She got a very good education in very small safe classes, in a school which actively worked to break up cliques and stop bullying -- because they had the staff. I had to do the work to make sure she also developed a social conscience. Some of my friends who chose public school had to hire math tutors for their children; a few ultimately left because of the problem of bullying and violence.

But we also never had 100% control over our choices. In SF there is no guarantee your child will get into the public school you want. Your child may not get into private school or you may not get the financial aid you need.

This choice is fraught for all of us, and Loh's Costco comparison is insulting as is her suggestion that we want just to lay down a Visa card and make it all go away. I and all of my friends, whichever way we chose, second-guess ourselves all the time. Someone asked: how do we afford private school? Here's how: we get financial aid. We live in homes most American middle-class families would find laughably small and inadequate. We put off needed home-repair (love that old knob-tube wiring!) We don't take fancy vacations, we don't buy new furniture or new clothes, in my family we're a one (old) car household and we have a sign-up sheet for using the car. Despite the stereotyped visions of people in San Francisco, we aren't eating in fancy restaurants and we aren't drinking much fancy wine (thank God for Two Buck Chuck.) Many of us don't splurge (often) on lattes. At all the private schools here you will see parents driving fancy Lexuses and Mercedes and you will see battered Corollas and Civics. We aren't saving near enough (or at all) for retirement. Our dilemmas are rooted in the fact that the nearby suburbs are unaffordable, and we're not willing to commute over 90 minutes each way. (Please don't tell us to move to some small town somewhere else where we haven't family, roots, friends, community or job opportunity -- I would never suggest that as the solution to whatever problem your community poses for you -- it's patronizing.)

I have witnessed the California school system move from top-ranked to being ranked near dead last, since 1978 -- basically in two generations -- thanks to Prop. 13. I see the effects all the time in the inadequately prepared students at our (very overcrowded) state university. Loh is wrong that it is up to parents to fix the public school system. It is up to VOTERS to, first, demand and then, second, PAY for better schools. Too many people spout that schools can't be fixed by throwing money at them. Yet we throw money at every other problem we want fixed (AIDS, breast cancer, Biden just today suggested sending $1 billion to Georgia to help sort them out after the battle with Russia.) I am certain that if our schools had the same amount of money our prisons (i.e.: triple the money) they'd be vastly improved.

One final point: it does no good to blame the baby boom generation, and in fact I'm not sure why Loh takes this gratuitous swipe. Pitting one generation against another only serves the wealthy elite who profit when interest groups fight each other. Smearing one generation only weakens the already frayed generational compact and will ultimately only hurt those at either end of the age spectrum.

Qualified educators are trained by the State. State mandated thought objectives of alternative lifestyles, global village idiocracy, feel-goodisms, and general Marxo-corporate consumerism, etc. are necessary to secure the credential. Teachers in both the private and public system are for the most part form filler-in-ers training form filler-in-ers of tomorrow. There is no History, it is now only Social Studies and much of the information is false. Teachers mean well but they have no clue what they are programmed to teach is detrimental by design.

We're form-filler-outers? We don't know what we're teaching? What we're teaching is detrimental? Have you been in every history teacher's classroom across the country to make such blanket statements about education? Much of the info I teach is false? Really? Even after all the outside research on various historical periods I do to supplement my lesson plans? And by the way, I fail to understand why teaching kids to be tolerant of people different than themselves is such a bad thing. Maybe if more people had empathy for each other the world wouldn't suck so bad. I also try to teach them to view advertising critically, but they're teenagers, they want to fit in, they're more susceptible to that stuff than adults are. So much for "Marxist corpo-consumerism." Whatever.

Most of the teachers I know have as their most important goal to get kids to be critical thinkers, to read/research information and come to their own conclusions, not just accept what people tell them at face value. The kids, on the other hand, just want us to tell them the answers. Last year I was doing a unit on fascism/totalitarianism in the 1920s/30s. I separated out some of the kids and treated them specially, gave them notes printed out, etc. The others had to stand at the back of the room and write notes I gave them (which were false, by the way). I then gave them an open note test, which of course the second group failed. I then told them why they failed it as a way to get them to question everything (didn't count the test, of course). My point was that I could have been telling them lies all year long and they would never have known the difference because they didn't do their homework and didn't question what I told them. It scared them, but got them to think, which was the goal.

I really hate it when people make blanket statements about stuff they obviously know nothing about.

@lateagain - I wasn't trying to shoot them messenger, I'm sorry if it sounded like it. And I'm sorry that the schools you sub at are so lousy. They must pay subs better than higher-quality schools. For what it's worth, I took a huge pay cut, and have taken on a giant student loan, to teach. I don't regret it at all.