The Toughest Test in Education

It’s amazing, but I swear that every day my 3-year-old grows a month older, and every day what once was an abstract question of whether to send her to an overburdened public school or an overpriced private school becomes more real, more pressing, more difficult.

We debate it often, my wife and I, and by now we each know the other’s script. She’ll start by mentioning how she toured the Mercedes-Benz School of Engineered Learning that day and was impressed by the ratio of four university professors to every preschooler. I skip the hair-raising tuition question, and ask simply if she’s walked up the block yet to see the public school. And we’re off.

Private schools, I argue, provide false shelter from the tumult of everyday life. None of the people we admire are products of the silver spoon.

What private schools provide, she counters, are teachers, chairs and learning materials. We want her to have the best, don’t we?

But where’s the evidence they do a better job of teaching?

Where’s the evidence public schools do any teaching? It’s all combat duty, baby-sitting and ESL.

But public schools won’t get better if we abandon them, and if they don’t get better, the whole state goes down the tubes.

Fine, but wait until it is your daughter who can’t read, who comes home with a bloody nose.

There is nothing extraordinary about our wrangling. All across California, parents are confronted by the question of education. It’s complex, pitting the parental instinct to take care of one’s own against a sense of societal duty to bring everyone up together, and I don’t know anyone who is comfortable with the options.

One in 10 California schoolchildren now receives private education. Though the ratio has remained fairly constant, I doubt it accurately reflects the concerns out there about public schools. Rich, poor or somewhere in the middle, we’ve all seen the same dire numbers, the population forecasts, the budget projections. We’ve collected the same anecdotal evidence, horror stories of classroom chaos and student violence. And we all are scrambling.

I know a Los Angeles man who grew so weary of his son’s schoolyard scuffles he moved to Wisconsin, an extreme version of the ever popular flight to the suburbs. There are stories, too, of parents who hear of a good public school in a nearby district and attempt to smuggle in their children, doctoring paperwork, forging addresses. A home-teaching movement is budding. I also know parents who easily could afford private schools but have chosen instead to make a stand, enrolling their kids in the neighborhood public school and then actively campaigning for improvements.

Finally, there are private schools. They have us over a barrel. My wife has visited nursery schools that demand more tuition than students pay to attend the University of California. With long waiting lists, these schools can be selective, accepting only the ritziest applicants. For instance, we know a family whose daughter, as part of the application process, was quizzed about the cardiovascular system: She was 4 years old.

Later this year, the education question will receive a broader airing. A proposition to provide state financing for families of private school children is expected to qualify for the November ballot. This promises be a donnybrook, with the gut issues of choice, taxpayer rights and privatization competing against the specters of segregation and certain ruin of a once proud school system.

At least in the abstract, this seems an easy measure to reject. California must rescue its public schools, and any proposal that bleeds students and money from the task is a retreat. For every abstract argument, though, there’s this 3-year-old I must consider: If the neighborhood elementary school is as rotten as its outer shell would suggest, the $2,600 voucher promised under the proposition will come in handy.

It’s strange, finally, how much of this turns on money. We pay property taxes, expecting a quality public education system in return. When that fails, we refinance our lives to afford private school. Either way, we’re counting on money to do the trick, and maybe that’s where it all goes sour. Maybe we should place more faith in ourselves and in the power of our own involvement and even love, and also in our children.

There’s another side to all that, I’m sure, and it’s likely I will hear about it soon, in the next debate. We save our battles for the quiet hours, when children sleep and grow too fast. For all the vigor we bring to the front, the fact is we are bluffing. Neither of us knows for sure what’s best for our daughter, and for a parent there can be no worse predicament.