A very close, very liberal friend of mine is a well-known name at NPR. He has three children, all educated in private schools. It costs him a fortune, one that he scrambles to pay.

I said to him, "If you - the voice of public radio - aren't going to send your kids to public school, who will?"

He told me that I don't understand. That I have no idea what goes on in public schools.

But I do know. I attended public schools for twelve years in California, before attending a state college.

The notion that "everybody goes to private schools now" is false, of course, and the result of an errant socio-economic perspective.

In the wake of a successful decade, I found that I had climbed onto this demographic rung myself. Today, most of the adults that I work with are people who spent their entire education in private schools.

They are good-hearted people, and well-connected. They have an assumption that they will get what they want in life, and it seems that they have to take fewer steps to get it.

But they are also insulated from the "other" America that represents 85% of our population. They are socially inept in situations that don't serve merlot. They want their tax dollars to go to the local police department to protect us from the people who attended public schools.

Forgotten is the ideal that public schools are a cooperative aimed at raising the level of knowledge and understanding and dialogue in society. Simply stated, PTA's have long existed because public schools have always needed them.

I have two young kids now. I can afford private school. But I won't. I feel it is a moral responsibility to our community - and to my children - to send my son and my daughter to a school that best represents the society that they will one day inhabit as adults.

And if my toddler one day aspires to the presidency, how would he properly govern a population from which he has been insulated from birth?

British schools are ENTIRELY social promotion. You're in year one or two, etc. Somehow they manage to not be a nation of chimps.

As far as "schools have enough money and they're spending it badly". For the sake of argument, I'll buy that. If 20 kids per qualified instructor in an equipped classroom DOESN'T cost more even better.

But start there. It's a good base-line and nobody would fight you on it. No teachers' union is going to fight for more students and crappy facilities. No parent is going to demand them either. No administrator or student is going to gripe about it.

Commit to it and commit to paying for it. It'll work.

I have not read all the letters here so forgive me if someone else has already written about this.

I am 50 and went to public school in the San Fernando Valley (Tarzana) in the mid 60's. In those days, California public schools were the envy of the world and fed into the UC university system.

Then, the republicans passed Prop 13 in 1969, I think, and it all went to hell. Republicans blame illegal immigrants for the decline in public schools, but the real culprit is that republicans just don't ever want to pay for anything.

Ok so now republicans want to pay for private education through vouchers. So we expand the voucher system nationally with federal general revenue tax money. At some point don't you have to ask yourself, "why are we spending all this tax money on private schools instead of just funding the public schools that we for some reason completely abandoned?"

Its hard not to see the voucher system as just a racist/classist way to avoid having their kids mix with poor people's kids.

Its also hard not to see vouchers as just a ideological attack on government in general. It has nothing to do with improving schools or education. Its just an ideological response against government. And against teachers unions.

was passed in 1978. It was a ballot initiative that set a property tax cap. It was sold to California voters by the Republican authors Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann as a "populist" measure to ensure that Mom and Pop wouldn't lose the family homestead, etc. Typically enough.

There actually was something of an extant problem in terms of onerous property tax pressures on homeowners in some income brackets.

But as is the pattern for Republican-pushed "anti-government populist" economic schemes, Prop 13 was a bait-and-switch scam. Sold as a grassroots measure to help ordinary plain folks keep their homes and to help with rising rent costs- once enacted, the principal result of the proposition was a massive windfall for the wealthiest Californians.

Consider California resident/multibillionaire Warren Buffett's assessment of Prop 13. He's advocated it's rollback.

Predictably, in short order the right-wing press immediately began its clucking, along the lines of "has he lost his mind?", etc.

You can read Buffett's exchange with the Wall Street Journal on the issue here:

http://wealthandwant.com/docs/Buffett_Prop13.html

Here are a couple of pro and con views on the subject:

Anti Prop. 13:

http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/2008/06/schrag_proposit.html

http://www.the-signal.com/news/article/3164/

Pro Prop 13:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-coupal3-2008jun03,0,2158158.story

http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/opinion/columns/article_1958204.php

I recommend reading the letters columns, too.

15 years after the passage of Proposition 13, one of my professors at UC Davis held forth with some impromptu comments to the effect that California was "in the process of dismantling the finest low-cost public university system in the world."

And just today, some 15 years after my professor made his remarks, I briefly skimmed through a Money magazine article that asked the question "is a college degree still worth it?"

According to a table in the article: in the past 25 years, energy costs have risen 108%, health care costs have risen 251%, and college tuition has risen 439%.

http://biz.yahoo.com/hmoney/080820/082008_college_price_moneymag.html?.v=1

More history: in 1965, when the program my professor referred to, the California State Higher Education Master Plan, was inaugurated-- tuition cost for the UC system was $200; for the State colleges, $90. Per year. And the community colleges were free.

For the Fall of 2008, the annual cost of tuition at a California university is expected to be $7,125, up from $6,571. The California State college tuition will be $3,048.

But hey, Americans have the gift of lower taxes in return- and if John McCain gets his way, they'll be even lower! Get happy! If you're like most folks, if McCain wins and the Republican tax proposals go through, you'll get hundreds more back on your 2009 tax refund! Or maybe just a bit less, if the Bush tax cuts provide any indication...

http://fasttaxrefund.blogspot.com/2007/07/tax-refunds-arent-as-hefty-as-expected.html

But, hey- I'm talking Cash Money! In your pocket!

By the way, for what it's worth: Neither Howard Jarvis or Jake Gann were Baby Boomers. Jarvis was born in 1903; Gann was born in 1912. The age range of the Baby Boom generation in 1978, when Prop 13 was passed: around 12-31 (birthdates beginning in the year 1946, the year after the WW2 vets returned to their spouses and started into breeding children in earnest, and ending in 1964, when oral contraceptives were first marketed to the public, leading to a downturn in the birth rate.) For those of you who are keeping score.