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You may find this hard to believe, but my oldest daughter, who is graduating from high school next month, has gotten a first-rate high school education in a public "magnet school," Tampa Bay Tech, in Tampa, Florida.

Yes, Florida! I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. I went to Florida public schools thirty years ago, and back then my school was absurdly bad. Not that they couldn't have been worse - at least my school's teachers didn't, for example, physically abuse the Jews in their classes because those Jewish students wouldn't accept that Christian Coalition parody of Jesus as their personal Savior. But I hardly learned anything in my high school classes and I was bored practically to madness. In contrast, my daughter's classes have been really hard and challenging, so she will be well prepared for her college classes next year. I wish I could have gone to a school as good as hers when I was her age.

The secret to the success of the "magnet schools" is that if a student is lazy or a troublemaker, the school authorities are allowed to kick him right out and send him back to the ordinary, high-school-as-day-care schools.

My biggest problem with the "magnet school" program is that it is too exclusive. It's great if you can get in, but for every student that is accepted into the program there are three applicants. As the "magnet schools" don't cost significantly more than the regular schools, which, as you rightly note, are more accurately described as baby-sitting compounds than educational institutions, I don't see any reason why the local school board doesn't immediately expand the "magnet school" program so that all the applicants, or at least all the ones who are academically qualified, can get in.

Incidentally, all three of my kids skipped out of public schools for the first few grades, instead doing home-schooling.

Why doesn't every family home-school? The answer should be obvious. When I was a kid, the average U.S. family had one parent with an outside job and one parent who stayed at home and kept house. On that single income, that average family was able to afford a house, a car, a TV, and the rest of the usual middle-class trappings. But in the last thirty years or so, the wealthy class, who control the prices and wages for the rest of us, have arranged things so that if the average family wants to own a house, both parents must work. While inflation disguises the effect, the fact remains that the American working class has thus gotten a massive effective pay cut over the last generation. Productivity is up, too, but that rich, powerful minority sequesters every cent of the excess wealth that is produced, resulting in America's ever-widening gulf between the median income and the income of the richest fraction.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net