Charles - I'm confused, for whom are they not the solution? It seems pretty clear that they were the solution for your child. Are you saying they are not the solution for society? As in, we shouldn't just dump public education and hand education over to the market?

The reason I ask is that you are touching on a common challenge for parents who want to do what they think is best for their kid (private school), can afford it, but don't want to play a role in undermining the public system. What it the 'right' action to take in that position? I felt you you were going there but I may have missed the point.

I went to Catholic School in New York City. At the time, based on my neighborhood, for a middle class person there was little choice. Public schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s in NYC had turned into violent prisons with low academic rankings.

For grammar school, the staff was almost entirely nuns. So it could be run very cheaply. Even with 4 kids my parents put us all through. Same with high school. My Catholic high school was also competitive within the system. You had to take a systemwide admissions test. It was still very cheap compared to private-private schools, again because the Marist Brothers were our teachers.

In college, I met a lot of kids from the "real" private schools. Groton. St. Paul's. Incredibly, I often found that my education was more rigorous than theirs. However, they made up for it by being jaded rich kids, who knew how to work the system. Whereas I was in the "best idea, or highest grade, wins, mindset" (thus less equipped to deal with the real world).

In the end, I almost wish I went to the prison school, John Adams High School. It would have better prepared me for the world in which we live, an anti-meritocracy where the biggest psychopath wins. I might have my own gang by now (they would dress something like The Warriors or that guy in Turk 182! Army jackets. Combs in back pocket).

Private schools should be against the law.

Charles, I admire your candor and poetic way of describing the world. But I take exception to any parent who congratulates themselves on the "sacrifices" they made to raise their own children. What is making and raising children, if not the ultimate act of egotism? Any effort taken in their upbringing is just another bit of worshiping yourself. You're "sacrificing" a bit of yourself only to make yourself look better. And I say all this as somebody who hopes to one day raise his own children.

I laud your decision to ensure your children's best possible education; but I won't countenance pretending it was a selfless act.

@3 Wow, welcome back, Fnarf. I think public schools should be funded until private schools become irrelevant, or at least just a small niche. Banning them world be a disaster to education reform, because suddenly the whole story would be about that, rather than fixing the public system.

@4 having kids might be considered egotistical, but taking care of them begin the bare minimum is feels like a sacrifice. They are definitely not 'you'. Even if it's evolutionarily another self interest, half of your ego doesn't know that. You might have to have kids to really understand that though.

I abandoned my son's public school for the same reason, namely they were totally failing to educate him. However, I assure you it's the gun-toting-blue-collar republicans in my town who never want to pay taxes.

School shootings seem to happen overwhelmingly in public schools, which is a pretty strong argument for sending your kid to private school if you can, social implications be damned.

I would imagine that the teacher in your son' school (public) also had vague idea of mathematics or at least how to teach it. Math is one of those confounding subjects that a lot of people have a lot of trouble understanding once it gets beyond simple arithmetic. Good math teachers are in great demand in all schools and I would suppose that the private school provided a better offer that the public school. I am not just speaking of money but of teaching conditions where the teachers will have the full support of parents who send their children to school to learn and not just to occupy their time and perhaps keep them out of trouble.

This argument is seriously flawed. Based on this logic those parents who no longer have kids attending any school would also shift their opinion on taxes since they no longer receive a direct benefit. Also any person that home schools will demand less taxes. Oh and those without children will not want their taxes to go to schools...

Principals are easy to have until they cost you something. Both my wife and I attended public schools. I have public school teachers in my family for three generations. But when faced with my son not testing into AP at one of Seattle's middle schools, we enrolled him in private school. This was on the advice of his public school teachers, so we felt we had too do this or lose him. He didn't excel, but he also didn't fall through any cracks. I hated doing it, but we saw no other alternative. He is now in a Catholic High School. Again, not slipping through cracks. Sorry, I disagree with the notion that having children is egotistical. At least from our perspective. We've just trying to help our lads make it through the system in a way that will allow them to live a positive, contributing life. And in my opinion, the reason Seattle has so many private schools is because of busing thirty or forty years ago. Call it white flight or affluent flight, but a lot of families either moved to the Eastside or enrolled their kids in private school. And in taking themselves out of the engaged-parents-of-means pool our city lost a lot of the members who would have pushed for funding and accountability. Well there you go. I wish I felt better now. But I mostly feel helpless.

I would develop the point of just how much private schools end up undermining teacher's unions.

As Seattle can see right now with the current teachers' strike, public schools offer workers a great deal more leverage to negotiate with management. Right now, teachers have the ability to shut down most of the K-12 system. That applies pressure to the Board to come to an accommodation. Everybody's interests get represented and a compromise is worked out.

Suppose, instead, Seattle had nothing but private schools (or perhaps a voucher system). What would happen if teachers at one school were unsatisfied with their working conditions? They might decide to organize at that school, but because each school is a separate entity making its own arrangements with its own employees, it's much harder to organize teachers across the entire area. So even if teachers at one school go on strike, parents simply put their kids into another school, and the striking teachers are out of a job altogether. It can't help but end up being a race to the bottom (as unfettered capitalism always is) for wages, benefits and working conditions.

The more I think about matters, the more I am convinced that that is exactly what the school voucher and private school promoters are really all about. It's about union busting; destroying district wide collective bargaining in an effort to lower costs, and hence taxes.

This is how privatization works. The "efficiencies" realized come about not as a result of better management, but rather on the backs of workers.