Teaching Your Children Well

Immigrants. High achievers. Impoverished, even homeless, children. Special ed kids. Hockey, soccer, and volleyball stars. Artists and chess whizzes. All of these and many more create the richness of our public schools, and public schools all over the state are success stories too.

For all the criticism, both specious and deserved, we must remember this: Our historic investment in public education has paid off, handsomely, in stellar academic achievement, social integration, and economic success. Turning our back on that tradition would be a colossal blunder. The current wave of students—including more poor children, more persons of color, more immigrants from nonliterate parts of the world, often with more special needs—will succeed here just as our own immigrant ancestors succeeded. But only if we hold the school doors open wide, as we’ve done for previous generations.

We’re not naive. We know public education faces significant, often staggering problems, here as well as around the country. We will discuss those problems later in this series. Yet none of the problems diminishes our pride in what’s so obviously good about Minnesota’s public schools.  

James P. Lenfestey is a former editorial writer for the Star Tribune. Marcia Appel is this magazine’s editor at large.