My father-in-law spent his whole career as a public-school teacher and administrator, mostly in New York City. He’s made powerful and persuasive arguments in favor of our public schools, noting that most kids actually come out of them with better educations (by well-defined measures, like achievement in college) than their private-school compatriots. Add to that the fact that any school, whether superb or half-decent, is secondary to the reading and other forms of edumucating that we do at home. That the only way public education’s going to get any better is when parents of promising kids don’t avoid it. That a number of elite-private-school kids whom I know as grownups are — how to put this delicately? — horrifying people. (No, I don’t mean this guy.)
Besides which: Our local public school is pretty good. Or, to put it another way, would a private school be $30,000 per year better? No.
And therein lies the only cloud on the horizon. That well-regarded public school is pretty full already. There’s an immense real-estate development planned a few blocks east of us. It will join the hundreds of condo units already plunked into the neighborhood in the past decade. And five years from now, when our son is looking to go into kindergarten, I hope to god that the local K-through-6 hasn’t become so swamped that a lottery system comes into the picture. We’re in a race against time: I’d like to see the economy improve in the next five years, but if the real-estate market could just stay a little sluggish, just to slow down the building spree, I really wouldn’t mind.
Of course, that’s easy to say when your kid is 11 months old. Get back to me when I am up against the pre-K wall, like my colleagues here, and I too might consider moving to another continent just to make this whole thing simpler.
Seriously. You don’t have to move to another continent. Just move north.