That is interesting, because as a lifelong public school educator, in systems ranging from high-resource, upper SES suburban to low-resource, low SES urban, I view sending my children to public school as a last resort, after homeschooling and private school. Maybe this has something to do with having seen behind the curtain.
I understand what you're saying here, but I should point out, my first eight years teaching were in public schools, and I presently spend five days a week as a volunteer classroom/library aide at DD's public school. I have a fair amount of experience behind that curtain as well...
I should clarify: what I meant by referencing seeing behind the curtain was that one is most aware of the flaws in a system with which one has intimate insider knowledge. Other systems might appear better, if only because we don't know about their issues. You are in the position of having seen behind multiple curtains.
P.S. As an aside, a personal bugaboo of mine is the current trend at elite private schools to hire unemployed PhDs as teachers. Elite schools love to use the claim that x% of our faculty has a PhD as a marketing draw (I've actually worked at two schools where I was the ONLY faculty member without a PhD; including folks like the PhD theater teacher and PhD P.E. coach). There is nobody less qualified, nobody, to teach a 6th grade class, than the PhD who thought they'd be tenure tracked at an Ivy League university by now...
And this is not a fad restricted to private schools. I've seen a few PhD faculty members, too, some of whom were already teachers, but went back to grad school (that works out no worse than a non-PhD teacher, and sometimes can be good), and others of whom did have a bit of that couldn't-get-a-tenure-track-job odor clinging to them. At the least, at the secondary level, their content specializations have some value.
