I went to two different public high schools that were nationally ranked and in some of the wealthiest parts of the country - one high school with some of the craziest tiger parents I have ever seen starting from kindergarten (and it is probably even worse now). And the amount of showing off of their wealth was so extreme that I hated to tell people what town(s) I lived in - and the public schools reflected those values.

My big issue with our public schools is that DS has not even had a chance to start, and we already hit head on into the age cutoff policy - and DS was already lashing out due to boredom in a traditional age preschool despite our attempts to push them to get what DS needed. We had to make a change, and only option was private school.

suevv, my main point with the statement that public schools have to take everyone is not on dealing with children with special needs but mainly even if the child does not want to be there and the family is not interested in addressing their child's educational needs, the rest of the kids in that class is still stuck with the churn and issues that comes with that child. We got a taste of that apathy in preschool (before the director finally gave up and asked the family to leave, when it became clear that the parents had no interest in addressing their child's misbehavior - violence towards other children that did not improve at all - after a few very long months). All the kudos to you that you work so hard to push and advocate for your child.

But for me, apathy is hard to battle - and that is what I find difficult to find acceptable for my children. So filling out an tediously long application or making effort to get teacher recommendations usually indicates that there is strong interest to be involved - there is some value to that. In fact, the author alludes to this with the AP English example - where just the act of getting teacher recommendation to apply tends to make those students more alert and focused in their class... I think there is something to that. I have experienced that in various times of my own school experiences, where that process of applying to a program/class (in public schools) really made those classes/program different - and where I feel we really got the best of what school was about. But those are rare.