Whenever I read stories like this one, about parents who stand up to defend their neighborhood schools from being shut down due to budget cuts, I am reminded of a common finding among studies and opinion polls on public education: America’s parents, by and large, believe that the schools their own children attend are good even as they believe that public schools as a whole are not. In 2004, for instance, 70% of parents graded their own neighborhood school an A or B, but only 22% of parents gave the same high marks to the nation’s public schools as a whole. Conversely, the same parents rated their child’s school a C, D, or F in only 28% of responses, but gave a C, D, or F mark to the public schools writ large in 63% of cases. These disparities have persisted over time, even as respondents have been selected from a diverse and representative sample.

In other words, public school parents are quick to agree with assessments about the need for dramatic improvement in public education across America, but they largely believe that their own schools are exceptions to the rule. Unfortunately, the parents can only be correct on one count. Either the first assessment is correct that our schools have something to do with our lagging performance internationally, staggering dropout rates, and inequality of educational opportunity, in which case a significant number of parents are simply overrating their own school for whatever reason, or the second assessment is correct and the vast majority of our schools are actually doing an exemplary job at preparing all children for successful lives in the 21st century.

If, as I am led to believe, the former is the case, what ought to be investigated further is why parents consistently overrate the quality of their own schools and, more importantly, what the implications of this tendency are for school improvement efforts. In asking these questions, my point is not to argue against parental involvement in community and state decisions about education (after all, parents frequently do have critical things to say, such as the complaints being made about high performing schools on the Detroit school-shuttering list), but simply to highlight a tricky tension that is unfolding in today’s standards based reform era when parents react to the bad news implicit in enforcing these standards. For in order for standards to hold any meaning, the lowest-performing of our schools must undertake at least some kind of serious corrective measure if they continue to fail children.

In light of this, many hard-nosed school reformers from both sides of the isle have argued for some time now that what is needed today is strong leadership that shuts down (or reconstitutes) continuously under-performing schools, rewards strong schools, and tries to foster and support all other schools to meet the same high standards as our best schools. The use of NCLB’s AYP measures and a growing number of value-added approaches ensures that what qualifies as a “strong school” cannot just be a comparatively wealthy district cherry-picking its already successful kids; indeed, our strongest schools will actually be those serving low-income rural and urban schools that raise the collective bar, against fierce headwinds, to proficiency .

But what if all of this just flies in the face of what parents want for their kids—which turns out often to be a desire for the status quo, to send their children to their neighborhood school even if it is worse than a viable alternative? What are policy makers to do—abide by the discretion of parents even if it’s not in the best academic interests of students, or do what they believe to be better for America’s democracy and economic future and shut down struggling schools that parents want to leave standing? What would you do?