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Writing in Slate, Allison Benedikt pens a “manifesto” for improving public schools: Call it the “all-in” approach. She uses a little “liberal guilt” to make her points.

“It seems to me,” she says, “that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.)”

Benedikt argues that everyone needs to be invested in public schools for them to improve. “Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment,” she says. “Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better.”

Click here to read her full take on things. And click here to read a line-by-line rebuttal by Michael J. Petrilli, writing for the National Review Online.