Not to poke at you guys who send your kids to private school, but my wife (who teaches at a public middle school) & I have a different position:
If all of the �good kids� with �good parents� get pulled from public schools and sent to private schools, then why are we surprised when we see what happens with what is left. Why are the �good folks� always so willingly to quietly go away instead of getting involved in making something better?
Maybe what Daniel is experiencing is a result of a dozen or so good folks pulling their good kids out of the school. What kind of positive impact could those good folks and good kids have on the class as a whole?
My wife�s school started an �Academy� a couple of years ago. Essentially, it is like a magnet school within the school. Thanks to �No Child Left Behind�( aka �No Child Gets Ahead�), the school was previously unable to set aside advance track students. The academy has allowed them to do that. Since its inception, the # of kids transferring out to private schools & magnet schools has dropped from nearly 40% to around 15%. As the school retains more of those kids, the overall school improves.
That only works in theory.
Actually, it doesn't just work in theory...it does work.
Here's the problem though. At some point, it's too late to "recover" from the private school flight, and no one wants to be the first to break the cycle. That's exactly the situation my wife and I are in. We are not about to pull our son out of an excellent small private school to place him in public schools where he'd be one of two or three white kids in a class of 20. I'm not being racist in saying that, I'm just being truthful.
That said, I'm not under any illusion that white folks are less to blame that anyone, though. I distinctly remember having a conversation with a pal of mine before my son was born. He was defending sending his kids to private schools, saying "well, the blacks have taken over the public schools". I looked him dead in eye, and told him that the blacks didn't take anything over, the whites let them have it. He didn't like it, but he knew it was the truth.
Unfortunately, the genie's out of the bottle now, and there's no way to get it back in at this point.
The main purpose of integration of public schools decades ago was to bring the blacks up to the level of the whites. Guess what...it's had the opposite effect. You don't see any black kids trying to act white, but you sure see a helluva lot of white kids that apparently want to be black. Makes me sick every time I see a white kid running around with a cap without a bend in the bill, or their pants sagging, etc.
