Picking up on a Washington Post article I blogged about a couple of weeks ago, in today’s New York Times columnist Brent Staples calls for public schools to get on the ball and provide a decent education for disabled kids. He also notes, though, that even if the public schools do markedly improve, “some severely disabled children will always need to be educated outside the public system.”

To many people, such a statement is practically heresy: Not only doesn’t Staples buy the rubbish dispensed by public schooling apologists that government schools must take all comers, he writes that public institutions will always need a private safety net to catch the most needy children.

This kind of reality-based heresy could easily get Mr. Staples rhetorically stoned by public school zealots. It’s also the kind of heresy that needs to be repeated over, and over, and over again.