As Erica Massman, a moderate Republican, told The Times, "They are trying to rebrand public education."

Yes, they are. And it's actually not a new thing. I've been hearing the phrase "government schools" since the early 1990s. Back then, it was mainly used by extreme libertarians who believe that pretty much anything the government does is wrong. (These are the same people who want to sell off the national parks.)

They also had a tendency to use the term "educrats," a word they made up, to describe the men and women who work in our public schools. Again, the idea was to slime the entire system.

This type of rhetoric annoyed me for several reasons. It wasn't just because there were public school teachers in my family and I knew how hard they worked or that I had attended public schools myself and years later could still reel off the names of teachers who made a real difference in my life. What really got me was a simple figure: 90 percent.

That is the percentage of Americans who send their children to public schools. Consider it again: 90 percent. That number has remained constant over many years. It has stayed at 90 percent despite all of the attacks on public education by the far right, despite the claims that our schools are "godless" and hostile to Christianity, despite the efforts by advocates of vouchers and the forces of privatization.

That figure of 90 percent tells us that most Americans rely on public schools. They want them and need them. In fact, in many communities, public schools are considered essential. People clamor to live in areas with good, well-funded public schools. Property values rise in such places.

Yet there are people today who would blithely toss the public school system aside in the name of ideology, religion or some misguided combination of both.

One key part of their strategy is simply to lie. Over and over again, they assert that the public schools have failed, that the system is falling apart and that some kind of radical change is needed.

In a recent issue of The Atlantic, Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., takes issue with this narrative. Schneider notes that yes, public education in some parts of the country is troubled (often in areas marked by poverty). But he also notes that our public schools are today better than at any point in the past. (Consider just one metric: high school graduation rates. In 2013-14, 82 percent of high school students graduated. In 1950, that number was 58 percent. Is there room for improvement? You bet. But that number is an all-time high.)

Schneider and other commentators have also pointed out that the United States is trying to do something unprecedented and unique: make education available to all in a sprawling nation of many different types of people.

"The evolution of America's school system has been slow," he wrote. "But providing a first-rate public education to every child in the country is a monumental task. Today, 50 million U.S. students attend roughly 100,000 schools, and are educated by over 3 million teachers. The scale alone is overwhelming. And the aim of schooling is equally ambitious. Educators are not just designing gadgets or building websites. At this phenomenal scale, they are trying to make people - a fantastically difficult task for which there is no quick fix, no simple solution, no `hack.'"

In his conclusion, Schneider asks, "Can the schools do more to realize national ideals around equity and inclusion? Without question. But none of these aims will be achieved by ripping the system apart. That's a ruinous fiction. The struggle to create great schools for all young people demands swift justice and steady effort, not melodrama and magical thinking."

Most importantly, this effort demands support from political leaders. Unfortunately, in Kansas and other states, not only is this support lacking, the public schools are getting heaps of derision instead.