COLUMN ONE : A Private Dilemma for Parents : A generation that viewed itself as open-minded and socially committed suffers a humbling showdown with conscience as it abandons the public school system.

WASHINGTON —  For Judy Sell, a 34-year-old graphic artist in Minneapolis, it was a decision as tough as any she and her husband have made since their son was born. It’s not something they’re entirely happy with, or proud of.

Indeed, they’re so uncomfortable about the whole thing that so far they’ve kept it secret from the neighbors for fear of being branded hypocritical or “politically incorrect.”

What the Sells did was decide--like President Clinton and his wife, Hillary--to send their child to private school.

“I’m trying to find good phrases from the editorials supporting the Clintons’ decision to use when I break the news to my neighbors,” says Sell, a liberal who lives in the city but will send 4-year-old Hank to a parochial kindergarten in the suburbs next fall. “I understand the Clintons. Your politics are sometimes different from what you really do when it involves your own kids.”

Millions of parents of all races who live in America’s troubled urban centers have come to the same anguished conclusion: The neighborhood public schools are no longer a viable option.

That judgment has itself become a major barrier to helping inner-city schools as they struggle against the consequences of poverty, drugs, violence, disintegrating families and low academic achievement. When middle-class families turn away from public education, it erodes political support for the schools, undermines funding and makes it all that much harder for the systems to improve.

“It’s a downward spiral,” says Ramsay Selden, director of the state education assessment center for the Council of Chief State School Officers. “The reason many people are not satisfied with urban schools is that urban schools are not able to offer the services that are attractive.”

The nation’s educational landscape is dotted with efforts to turn the situation around, many of them highly touted and innovative and some showing signs of progress. Many districts are offering parents more public school choices than ever before, including a variety of special programs.

But up to this point at least, nothing has proved to be a cure. The defections continue, made all the more painful because they stir such feelings of discomfort, even guilt, among those who have long espoused allegiance to public schools as a social institution, and to city life and to a culturally and racially diverse environment.

For a generation of young parents who grew up believing they were more open-minded and flexible than their parents, it has been another humbling showdown with conscience. Raised in the wake of the civil rights movement, priding themselves on a rejection of elitism, claiming an ideal of different cultures and economic groups living together, they’ve found themselves trading it away wholesale for one unchanged Middle American staple: the demand for an education that will let their kids compete with the best.

Consider Mary Rush, a 34-year-old former teacher whose daughter, Helen, started kindergarten in a Washington, D.C., public school last fall.

“It’s a very tough problem,” says Rush, who is white. “I feel committed to the idea of a public school education and I love living in the city, but probably by the time Helen’s in second grade, and maybe even next year, she’ll be in private school or we’ll move to the suburbs like everyone else seems to do.

“Lots of kids from the projects are in my daughter’s school. It’s not so much a question of color as it is a question of class. When I go on a field trip and hear the tough talk of the kids in her class, I think: ‘What am I doing. Am I being fair to her?”

“I just wish I knew what the right answer is,” Rush adds with sigh.

The same sentiments are found in Los Angeles, where a fatal shooting at Fairfax High School last week seems certain to fuel parental uncertainties about school safety.

Carl Byker, a 36-year-old documentary filmmaker, says friends who buy houses in his predominantly Latino Echo Park neighborhood are liberals who arrive planning to send their children to public school because they believe in the concept. But it doesn’t work out that way, he adds.

“We live in an area we like a lot, and there’s a school six blocks from here,” Byker says, noting that the school has an outstanding principal who actively campaigns to recruit white parents.

“But there’s a house with gang members living in it right across the street from the school and there are shootings,” Byker says.

So 4-year-old Sam Byker will probably go to private school in Pasadena next year.

“We would feel socially good about sending Sam to public school, but we don’t want to make an experiment of him. We want to do what’s best for him,” his father says.

Bailing out often means leaving a school with a significant minority population for one with a small one, but many parents insist race is not a motive. In fact, they say, the loss of racial diversity, an ideal of the civil-rights-movement generation, is a painful one.

The trend also crosses racial lines: Many nonwhites are sending their children to private schools, too.

Sandra Smith, who is black, decided it was worth scrimping and saving to put her daughters in Catholic schools, in part because she wanted to expose them to children from more advantaged economic backgrounds.

“We live in a lower-income environment,” says Smith, 38, who works for the federal government in Washington. Private school “gives them the experience of being around children who have a little more, and helps them strive to have more themselves.”

Some parents resist the switch while their kids are in elementary schools--which tend to be relatively small and more receptive to strong family involvement--then succumb in junior high and high school years when academic pressure is the greatest and the problems of drugs and violence most threatening.

Marie Wilson-Lindsay, 38, a black lawyer with her own firm in Washington, sends her two daughters to special public schools where parental involvement and high academic standards are stressed.

“My husband and I gross a lot of money and we could put our daughters in private school if we wanted,” Wilson-Lindsay says. “But I’m a native of Washington, and I believe you can’t complain about public school systems if you’re not ready to pitch in and help.”

Nonetheless, when her older daughter, Constance Lindsay, 11, goes to high school in a year and a half, it will be to a private school.

“My daughter is a straight-A student,” Wilson-Lindsay says. “I don’t want to take the risk. I’m worried about the violence. A lot of schools actually have metal detectors. I don’t think any child should have to go (to school) in that environment.

“If you have money, you don’t have a choice but a private school,” she says.

The tales of soul-searching and the justifications are received with understanding but also bitterness by some city school advocates and determined parents, who say these people may feel guilty because they are facing their own hypocrisy.

“I am frustrated with these parents,” says Delabian Rice-Thurston, the director of Parents United for D.C. Public Schools, a group struggling to stem the slippage. She is keeping her two children in public schools, she says, and others would as well if they really believed in what they claim to.

Parents are demanding high standards and solutions without making the personal investment to get them enacted, she and other critics say. These parents, the critics add, must share in the blame for the problems they are now fleeing.

“The middle class abandoned the schools once they became significantly lower class or minority,” Rice-Thurston says. “When we (the middle class) leave the public schools, we destroy what is left, because there is no one left to fight for it. . . . When you have a group of parents that does not demand high standards, then you get bad schools.”

Nationally, the percentage of students in private schools has actually declined slightly in recent years, according to Mike Casserly, acting president of the Council of the Great City Schools. It is now about 11% of the 45 million school-age children.

However, educators say that is partly due to the fact that many middle-class parents are unable to afford tuition for private education, so switch instead to public schools in the suburbs.

In Los Angeles County, 18% of school-age children now go to private schools. Of those in public schools, 52% are on reduced- or free-lunch programs, indicating they are from low-income families. In the city of Los Angeles, the percentage is 69%.

“These numbers have been going up every year,” says Jim Parker, social research coordinator at the Los Angeles County Department of Education. “The trend is clearly toward more poor kids” in city schools.

“What you do find is more middle-class families move out of the cities for better schools because they cannot afford private schools,” says Casserly. “This has resulted in an ever more concentrated population of poverty in the cities. It has enormous ramifications for public education.”

Reversing the trend is a daunting challenge considering that the average per-pupil expenditure in large urban public schools is $5,200 per year, compared to the suburban average of $6,073.

The gap helps contribute to a difference in educational standards, curriculum choices, specialty programs and other amenities that competitive middle-income parents demand for their children.

There is also the issue of safety. According to a recent National Education Assn. report, 100,000 students bring guns to school each day across the nation, and 40 are killed or wounded by gunshots. The phenomenon is particularly conspicuous in city public schools.

Aware that urban schools are steadily losing the very families they need for revival, many cities are desperately trying new experiments and approaches. In Minneapolis, the public system now gives parents a choice among many different kinds of schools--some stressing particular academic disciplines such as humanities, mathematics and sciences or foreign languages, others employing special teaching techniques such as Montessori or open classrooms.

“We have worked very hard to keep white middle-class kids in our schools,” says Joyce Chisholm of the city’s school board. “We’re not going the way of Los Angeles or Chicago, but to say we’re winning the battle would be going too far.”

Currently, 5% of the 43,000 students in Minneapolis public schools pull out each year to go to private schools or to the suburbs. That percentage has not grown, but only because of the choice system, according to Chisholm.

In New York, a broad school choice program was launched just last week. It will allow students to apply to attend any elementary or junior high school in the city, even if it lies outside their own district.

The issue of school choice was a notable part of the presidential campaign, with former President Bush calling for a more radical form--giving parents education vouchers they could spend in either public or private schools.

Clinton advocated the limited alternative of allowing government-subsidized choice only inside the public system. To do otherwise, he said, would dangerously weaken the public schools.

It was this position that put Clinton so clearly in the cross hairs of controversy when he announced that upon moving to Washington, he and his wife would put their 12-year-old daughter, Chelsea, in an elite private school. Critics were quick to note that this is not an option for many others who would like to have access to better schools but, unlike the Clintons, cannot afford $10,000 in annual tuition.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a television interview, firmly insisted that this step was not a personal betrayal or loss of faith in the public school cause. It merely took into consideration that Chelsea’s father “is going to be the President, with all that entails and with the extraordinary pressures that all of us will feel to keep our lives together,” she said.

“Bill and I feel so strongly in respect to her that she have a chance to have a life that is as normal as it can be,” she added.

Yet some critics drew the comparison to the decision made by President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, 16 years ago when they sent their daughter, Amy, to public school.

In neither case was safety an issue, officials say. Secret Service agents accompany presidential children, or, in the case of George Bush, grandchildren, to school every day anyway, regardless of the kind of school they attend.

Though some school advocacy groups were quick to slam the Clintons’ apparent inconsistency, many parents were not ready to join in.

Pat Kelly, whose daughters Elizabeth, 14, and Sarah, 11, are in the sixth and ninth grades at public schools in Minneapolis, faces the big question every year. And every year it’s getting tougher.

Sarah’s classmates are now “much less prepared to study and less disciplined,” Kelly says. Because many middle-class families have left the district, most children in the class are from poor families, including two who live in homeless shelters.

“She will not do work while she sits and tries to figure out why some kids (in her class) do not have homes,” Kelly says.

Kelly says she hates the thought of taking her children out of a place where they can know kids of other races and from a wide range of backgrounds. But as the concerns mount and as one special program after another is eliminated by budget cuts, “each year we have to ask, ‘Is this going to be good for them?’ ”

John Pfeiffer, the Parent Teacher Assn. president at the Capitol Hill Cluster Schools in Washington, said that although the defections have hurt city schools in Washington badly, he believes the tide can be turned here and in other cities.

He and his wife talk with neighborhood parents and implore them to keep the faith, he says.

“You need a strong group of parents, black and white, with middle-class backgrounds, strong families and deep appreciation of the value of education to hold these schools accountable and keep the schools going,” he says.

Pfeiffer’s eldest child completed all nine elementary school years at the Cluster Schools and his three younger children now go there.

But he understands the dilemma. His oldest daughter now attends a private high school. So will his other children when the time comes. “We drew the line for ourselves there,” he said.