I thoroughly understand.
My children attended a Montessori preschool, because that was within our means and there is no public preschool here. Next they attended tax-funded* elementary school until this became quantifiably harmful to them, at which point we enrolled them into NCCL, which I cannot recommend highly enough. The kids of lesser means continued in the toxic environment my children fled. After NCCL my elder child tested into a tax-funded “magnet” high school, a situation that became so thoroughly disastrous that I am grateful everyone survived. (That is not a metaphor - having your child on suicide watch due to zero tolerance is far more common than people realize. Parents don’t want to risk crippling their child’s future with any stigma of mental illness, so they’ll typically keep it secret.) In order to keep my spouse from murdering the magnet school’s principal, we switched to our public “feeder pattern” high school, which is characterized by high poverty and crime rates among the student body. There my children are consistently among the highest achieving, most respected students, basically because of the advantages their relative wealth gives them - we have books in our home and speak grammatically, and discuss complex topics over the dinner table, but many of their peers do not have literate parents, shared family meals, or leisure to contemplate anything other than how to avoid arrest. The number of students with full-time jobs and/or children of their own is pretty high.
If I could afford private high school, maybe I would do so. But I like to think that our experience with zero tolerance had one good effect - our brief glimpse of that hellish crucible made our family aware of what’s really going on, and unwilling to abandon the public school system. And honestly being the highest performers in the local school is a huge psychological advantage for the kids, despite the higher risks. They are leaders. I would not send any child of mine to a “charter” or “magnet” school again; that would be contributing to the problem, without really benefiting my own kids. They’d just be lost in the pack with all the other upper and middle class children, and since we’re a mixed race family they’d be held up as “proof” that the system is not racist. We don’t need any of that!
* Property tax, worse yet local property tax, which inevitably creates even more problems.
