Wow. This is really sad.

I went to a public high school and loved it. (It's actually an IB school, too, for 11th and 12th grades, a program I enrolled in. I also now coach at this school.) And while it wasn't as good a school as Park, Gilman, Boy's Latin, Friend's, or McDonogh -- some of top-tier schools in and around Baltimore, private, where the rich parents send their kids -- I loved it. IB was a rigorous program, even if only a minority of students went through the program. That number is growing. But I mainly attended class with poor or middle-class black kids.

I was disappointed in hearing how assured a decision it was to decide on private school. But I'm thinking about it, and it's undeniable: while I may have had a very good experience at a public high school, most students do not, and nary a one of us got the experience of rubbing shoulders with the children of CEOs, doctors, lawyers, and rocket scientists, not to mention sitting in front of the teachers those tuition dollars secure. And if I get past the initial defensiveness of my own public school experience, I realize how, even at a magnet high school, there was some woefully inadequate schooling going on in some parts. Sigh.