A Public School Dad's Plea to Private School Parents

— -- (Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on Babble.com. It has been reprinted here with permission. Disney is the parent company of both Babble and ABC News.)

Now that my daughter is in kindergarten, I’m suddenly thrust into this position that so many parents find themselves eventually. I’m a parent of a public school kid now, with two more sons following their sister’s lead in the next few years. I have to decide now if I want to be the parent who really cares about the schools they attend, or if I’m the parent who drops them off at the bus stop and helps them with some homework, but ultimately doesn’t give the whole schooling thing much further thought. (You know, until the day comes when college tuition bills bust through my living room wall like The Hulk.)

In my case, I can’t help myself. I care. A lot. I’m not alone either and I know it. We want the very best for our kids. We want them to have all the chances that we never had. Part of the gig as parents has always been to hope that our children have at least a slightly better life than we’ve had. Even if our life has been grand. It’s just human nature. It’s just the way love works.

And so I’ve been wondering about something lately. Even if we choose to ignore the staggering problems facing so many American public schools, most of us still know they’re there. It’s a reality and that’s that. But what I’ve been pondering as of late is whether or not the presence of private schools (and let’s be brutally honest here, private schools are often better schools) really messes with the ability of public education to ever move forward.

Sometimes I think that maybe private schools are a big part of the education problem in America. I know, I know, that sounds completely ridiculous on the surface, a grotesquely uninformed statement made worse by the following facts:

a) I’m no expert on education (far from it, actually).

b) I’ve never attended a private school.

c) I don’t have a child in private school (but I do have a daughter in a public one).

But bear with me here, people. My theory is simply my own and is just a gut feeling, but there might be something in it to at least think about.

It occurs to me that while private schools are tremendous places to attend (from better facilities, to smaller teacher-to-class ratios; from drafting the cream of the educator crop into their fold, to obscenely high success rates for graduates) there is also the notion attached to all of that which hints at an ugly fact. In order to get the best education possible in the land of the free, you better have the big bucks to pay for it.

And I think that sucks on a bunch of levels. Look, we certainly aren’t a poor nation (not by a long shot) and yet, there are maybe a few dozen or so special-case public schools in the whole of the land that can compete with even your basic private school education.

What’s up with that? How do we look ourselves in the proverbial mirror and feel okay with that knowledge?

Doesn’t it seem odd for a country that sells itself as the single greatest one in the world for opportunity to stand and watch most of its young people locked outside the gates of the the best education possible? I mean, it seems to me that the elite privilege of a private school education is based on this unspoken agreement amongst us all where we allow that a truly great education, and the true success that comes with it later in life, are both a sword best swung by the wealthiest among us.