If you're reading this, it's because you have a choice.

Or you had one. At some point, you weighed the options of where to send your child to school: public versus private, city versus county.

My family, too, had that choice—one many families in Baltimore City do not. In our case, it was a long-ago decision that pre-dated having kids. But I still count us as part of that lucky subset of city residents with education options; even luckier now, as we watch the fruits of that choice unfold.

Every day I catch glimpses of my two young daughters growing and changing in extraordinary ways—ways directly related to their school environment. I see them working through new ideas during homework, at dinner, and before bed while talking about their days. In my second-grader I see a sense of self taking root, curiosity giving way to possibility as she seizes her teacher's nudges toward independence. In a few short months of pre-K, meanwhile, our younger daughter is more proficient in American Sign Language by the day and beginning to see herself as someone who can help, comfort, and lead others. They are building a social and academic foundation that will make them successful learners their entire lives.

As a longtime education reporter in the city, and just a regular city resident with neighbors and friends, I know well the reasons why many parents in Baltimore choose private school over public, suburban living over city. I also know that, as parents, we strive to make choices that best fit our family experience, priorities, and hopes. For our own small part, I'm happy to report that our family experience has been enriched by our choice to enroll our children in Baltimore City's public schools: Our family priorities have been met, and our hopes exceeded.

When Lily, our 7-year-old, asked me about this article, I told her it was about why we live in Baltimore and send her and her sister to city schools. Her response: "Well, why wouldn't we, Mama? This is a great city."

A simplistic view, some might say; the words of a child. And maybe Lily's line of reasoning wouldn't wash with parents who bemoan the city's low test scores and sundry other unsavory realities and influences. But in those few words, Lily says much more about the potential of a Baltimore City public education than those who, in my experience, condemn and flee it.

It's a potential my husband, Terry, and I zeroed in on early in our fifteen years here in Baltimore City. We decided this was where we wanted to build our life and, some day, our family. And to us, building that life meant weaving our way fully into the rich urban fabric around us.

As children, Terry and I both got happy starts in white, solidly middle-class suburban communities, in school populations mirroring those communities. My fourth-grade class had one Jewish student in it; there were two students with special needs in my older brother's sixth-grade class, one of them black. To the extent that my elementary school was diverse, Michael, Julie, and Arthur were it.

Subsequent years broadened that narrow view of the world. When I was 11 my family moved overseas and I saw poverty my leafy oasis would never have let me imagine; I discovered that most people in the world were not blonde, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned like me. I knew that when I had children of my own, I didn't want them to have to wait to see all the world had to offer.

Terry grew up in the Chicago suburbs and Oklahoma. His initial affection for Baltimore springs from a similar place. And, like mine, it has grown into a deep love and concern for the city, its people, its foibles, and all that comprises our life here. As journalists, we both became all the more immersed in the city over the years, and all the more painfully aware of its seemingly intractable problems—not least of which was the disastrous state of its public school system. But private school was never an option for us, philosophically or financially. And despite the dismal assertions and data, the notion of leaving the city for a better public school system never crossed our radar.

Terry and I have engaged frequently and fervently over the years in discussions of urban, public education with colleagues and friends. And we've endured our share of "Just wait …," "You'll see …," and "You don't want your child to be a guinea pig for school reform," or insinuations that we're somehow blinded by idealism or sadly naïve. But if there's one criticism in this debate I will strongly refute, it is the latter. At every step we have approached our children's education armed with facts—and with eyes wide open.

Herein, perhaps, lays our handicap; maybe even hypocrisy. We have thrown ourselves at Baltimore's public school system completely, but not without the lucky advantage of being fully armed with information that comes from my many years as an education reporter. While I exhausted much more time and ink over the years on the system's administrative ineptitudes and incessant failures to meet students' wide-ranging needs, one thing that repeatedly struck me were the principals, teachers, and programs that proved, day in and day out, that our public schools are capable of doing right by our kids.

A program at Lombard Middle School, where just 21 percent of students met the state academic grade last year, comes to mind. A friend of mine who works to empower young, black males—and ensure that they don't fulfill societal stereotypes and become another grim statistic—paired up with a teacher at Lombard Middle a few years back, and for a semester led an after-school workshop on violence. The idea was to get kids thinking about violence and articulating their ideas, feelings, and experiences associated with it. The end result was a book in which the students shared those feelings and experiences, and they unveiled it outside the East Baltimore home of Angela and Carnell Dawson, which, some months prior, had been firebombed by drug dealers. The five Dawson children—who all  died, along with their parents, as a result of  the fire—were the Lombard Middle students' peers.

My friend used a subject that was both meaningful and real to connect with the students, and the level of thinking and quality of writing that connection produced was extraordinary. Maybe it wasn't particularly "academic" in nature, or literary in the classic sense. But the work these students engaged in and ultimately produced represented an informed and passionate response to the world around them. In my book, that's the essence of what a good education should accomplish.

There were many other programs I learned about through work, some of which our daughters are beneficiaries of today. And there have been others that we've learned about since having children enrolled in city schools. Lily is in second grade at Midtown Academy, a charter school five blocks from our house. Founded eleven years ago as part of a small pilot program, Midtown today is part of a growing movement to inject rigor, autonomy, and innovation into the city school system through charter schools and small, specialized high school academies. Maryland passed charter legislation in 2003, and today Baltimore leads the state, with twenty-two charter schools as of this year. (Prince George's County is a distant second with four charter schools to date.)

The school, K–8 with one class per grade, was founded on the idea that two racially and socioeconomically distinct inner-city neighborhoods—Reservoir Hill and Bolton Hill—could come together and create a school that celebrated those differences. It was both a noble and difficult endeavor, in which the challenges have been many: insufficient finances, undersized and outdated facilities, messy governance, distrust, principal and staff churn, student departures. But at every turn, more educators and parents than not have dug in their heels and fought for the school's perseverance. The saying that the good things in life don't come easy wasn't coined for nothing. And Midtown is, undeniably, one of those very good things.

As parents in a small school community where parent participation is required and the closeness and sometimes conflict can be intense, our years at Midtown haven't been all easy. Nor was our initial decision to send Lily there. We were equally taken with Mount Royal Elementary/Middle, the public school Lily is zoned to attend, and when Lily didn't initially make the Midtown lottery, that's where she was headed. Even after a spot for her at Midtown opened up, we wrestled for several weeks with the decision; we were in the extremely fortunate position of having to choose between two excellent public schools within walking distance. But Midtown is smaller and structured to let parent voices be heard—which, within reason, interested us greatly. And hands down, it has been a fantastic choice for Lily.

Every staff member, most of the 180 students, and a whole lot of parents know her face and name—and she knows theirs. She has instruction in Spanish, music, art, and Tae Kwon Do every week. As a public school student, she was able to take advantage of a scholarship to attend Saturday art classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art for a semester. And, as a city resident, she can now take weekly dance classes at the Baltimore School for the Arts, also for free. Mostly, though, Lily loves school, is well-adjusted and self-aware and, well, just a deliriously happy kid.

Prior to Midtown, Lily went to pre-K at the William S. Baer School in West Baltimore, a public school for children with severe physical disabilities that has inclusion built into its pre-K and kindergarten programs: Children without disabilities learn, eat, and play with children who use feeding tubes, wheelchairs, and walkers. And now Nell, our younger daughter—who learned to walk at Baer, pulling herself up on the chairs and walkers that line the hallways—is a Baer student herself, learning new ways to communicate, asking lots of questions and carving out her own extraordinary experience.

The arguments people cite against sending their children to city schools are numerous, and often very particular to individual circumstances. But there are a few recurring statements: City schools are dangerous. Test scores at city schools are terrible. I don't want my child to be a minority. And to these, I feel the need to respond.

I'm not certain that schools in the county are necessarily safer than in the city; I often wonder: Do the statistics truly support that statement? Do kids in the suburbs not fight or carry weapons to school? (Anecdotal evidence and regular news reports suggest they do.) And, by raising this argument, are people suggesting that those of us who do choose city schools are somehow gambling with our children's well-being?

As for test scores, how many parents really study these and know what they mean for their children? The nation's education experts can't even agree about their purpose and significance. I'm told that my own child's scores last year on the Stanford Achievement Test were excellent, and each year I see Midtown among the city's top scorers on standardized tests. But I look at Lily and Midtown, and can honestly say that none of those numbers suggest anything to me about her overall education and success in school.

And finally, many parents express concern about their child being in a racial—some say socioeconomic—minority. Why? We live in a city where nearly 70 percent of residents are African American and more than one-third live below the poverty line. I also wonder if that concern works the other way around: Are these parents equally concerned about their children being in a majority? Placing a child in a substantially white environment for its own sake strikes me as racist and classist—a reflection more of parental ignorance and fear than of a child's skin-color sensibility. Kids, frankly, don't care.

Both of our children are minorities in their schools: Midtown and Baer, like the city they serve, are more than two-thirds black, with significant numbers of children who are also poor. (Midtown is 69 percent African American and 40 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch; for Baer those numbers are 84 percent and 65 percent, respectively.) Are our girls somehow worse off for it? Have they suffered in any way? Do they have a skewed sense of self or view of the world as a result? Hardly. And I feel certain most parents at Midtown and Baer School—white and black—would jump just as quickly to dismiss any such notion.

It's fragile terrain, this school debate. The stakes are huge—our kids' futures—and because it's fueled by core beliefs, prejudices are often laid bare. As parents we can be passionate, which makes it a difficult topic to discuss without having strong opinions and passing judgment on (or being judged by) others. And because our choices for our kids reflect us as parents, we feel compelled to defend those choices, often stridently.

But in the end, the only people Terry and I need to answer to on the subject of our children's education are our two daughters. We want Lily and Nell to navigate with both heart and smarts the world around them. We want them to have a deep connection with other human beings, built on appreciation and understanding. And given that, the choice about schools for us has always been clear.

—Freelance reporter Molly Rath lives in Bolton Hill.

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