Jerry Jesness is a special education teacher in a south Texas elementary school. His email address is: jjesness@hiline.net.

I am a public-school teacher who sends his children to a private school. For this I make no apologies. I am no more a hypocrite than an autoworker who rides the bus to work or a merchant who sells lottery tickets while wisely investing his own spare money in stocks or bonds. As a parent, I choose what is best for my children.

I attended public schools myself and at one time expected that my children would, too. My wife and I had many an argument over where our daughters would attend school. She, a product of Catholic education, always wanted our daughters to attend private school. Both the egalitarian and the cheapskate in me wanted them to at least begin in public schools. We decided to let my oldest daughter attend public kindergarten and then wait to decide about future grades.

I had a change of heart when my boss, anticipating the enrollment of my oldest daughter, warned me not to teach my daughter too much at home lest she learn more quickly than her peers and thus misbehave out of boredom. Oddly enough, I understood her point. As my school was structured, it was better off without my daughters, and my daughters were better off without my school.

Contractual agreement vs. rights and obligations

Those who live in areas with predominantly minority populations and send their children to private schools are sometimes accused of racism. But race is not what keeps our daughters in private school.

The student population at my daughters' school, like that of the public school where I teach, is predominantly Hispanic. Although the Catholic school has a few more Anglos than the public school, my daughters do not notice. The friends of the two oldest all are Hispanic and Asian, while the youngest has only one non-Hispanic white friend, a French Canadian.

Neither is the quality of the teachers the reason for our decision to educate our children outside the public-school system. I would gladly have many of my public-school peers teach my children, and, besides, private-school faculties are not without their weak links.

Private schools are more accountable to the students than the system

My children's attendance at their Catholic school is the result of an agreement. My wife chose the school and made a personal sacrifice to get our children there.

Her first choice was a Catholic school in Brownsville, Texas, near her workplace. But when a newly minted doctoral educator took control of that school, bringing brave new reforms that resulted in a huge turnover in staff, my wife decided not to risk placing our children there. She changed jobs and increased her commuting time in order to get our children into her next choice, a Catholic school in Harlingen.

We knew what to expect from the school. We even sought the school because it offered the academics we wanted for our children. When we enrolled our children, we knew what the school expected of them, and the school knew what we expected of it.

If at any time we decide that the school is not providing an adequate education to our children, we may remove them. If my children fail to follow the rules, they may be removed. They have neither a right nor obligation to be there.

The rule of the ringing telephone

Another reason that we chose a private school is that public schools are too prone to follow what California teacher and former administrator Robert Wright called the rule of the ringing telephone. Wright complained that public-school teachers and administrators are judged by the quantity, not quality of complaintsagainst them.

This has been my experience as well. Fear of lawsuits or controversy may cause public schools to mollify those who are likely tomake the most noise, too often by lowering academic standards or rescinding disciplinary actions. Private schools can simply invite malcontents to leave. The right of students and parents to vote with their feet allows private schools to stick to their principles.

Another shortcoming of public schools is standardized testing. More schools are turning to them for accountability. Here in Texas, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) is the standard. Some of my daughters' private-school teachers joke that they get "TAAS refugees." By that, they do not mean those fleeing the rigor of the test but rather those fleeing schools where curricula have been narrowed by the test.

I would rather see my third-grade daughter fail a standardized math test because of faulty recall of multiplication than to pass it by drawing sticks and counting them. But our public schools, looking for quick fixes to raise scores, do not see the situation that way. An ounce of integrity is worth a ton of accountability, and a system that is directly responsible to parents is more likely to exhibit integrity than one ranked only by test scores.

Saving a sinking ship

I hope to live to see the day when public education becomes as accountable to parents as private education, and the day when students who want to learn can be matched with teachers who want to teach without parents paying directly out of their pockets. Until then, I will continue to teach public school while entrusting my children's education to a private one.

And heaven help America's children if all of us cynical teachers abandon the public schools, leaving public education in the hands of those who believe it is working well.