The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School amaze us.

But wait:  Marjory Stoneman High School is a public high school. It takes all comers. It’s diverse: 59% of the students are white, 12% black, 20% Hispanic, 7% Asian, and 2% multiracial. Most stunning is that 23% of the students qualify for free and reduced lunch, which indicates their extremely low family income. There are no exclusions for students not having an aptitude for academics or not having English as a first language as in charter schools. There is no tuition for parents to pay as they must for most private schools even with vouchers.

What if our public school are not failing? What if we are failing them, as a country, by not supporting them and, instead, are putting our tax dollars into “public” charters and vouchers? What if the kind of excellence we saw from public school kids at the Tony Awards can happen everywhere if we as citizens and taxpayers want it enough?