A vital compromise: it's time to give vouchers a try in our worst public schools.

Reminders of the sorry state of our urban public schools wash over us daily in waves of headlines about high failure rates, collapsing school buildings, and incompetent teachers. Meanwhile, the politicized debate between private-school voucher proponents and public-school defenders has become almost as numbing as the stories of school failure. As an education reporter for a national chain of newspapers, I have found the rhetoric on both sides to be at odds with the reality. Caught up in the ferocity of the debate, many advocates seem to have lost touch with the basic question that should be at the root of reform: What are the ingredients of a successful school in a poor district?

Let's start with Houston's Roosevelt Elementary, a jewel of a school in a neighborhood strewn with barbed wire and broken glass. This is an area where children arrive unable to identify colors, let alone letters. An astonishing 41 percent of the school's families move every year and 60 percent of the children come from single-parent homes. In short, Roosevelt has all the makings of a horror story headline school. But since arriving five years ago, principal Charlotte Parker has fired up her staff, muscled the district bureaucrats aside to win more teacher planning time, and taken on the nationally acclaimed "Success for All" reading program. By the 4th grade you can barely tell her kids apart from their suburban counterparts on the TAAS, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. Privately, I put the school to the parent test: Would I send my two school-age daughters here? No problem.

Shortly after my visit to Houston, I decided to check out Loyola Catholic Grade School in Denver, which draws on the same inner-city children the Denver public schools are serving so erratically. In exchange for a laughably small annual tuition of $1,950, the children who,spend a few years under the strict tutelage of Principal Sister Mary Ellen Roach leave well educated, well disciplined, and motivated. And, yes, they also look great on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills: Loyola third graders, nearly all black, score in the 72nd percentile in math and the fifth graders score in the 76th percentile in reading. Same question: To avoid one of Denver's lousy public schools would I prefer to send my children to a school run by Sister Mary Ellen? Absolutely.

The good work of Charlotte Parker proves the teachers unions right when they say there are good public schools out there. And the equally impressive work of Sister Mary Ellen Roach shows voucher advocates right in saying some children fare better in private schools. There has to be a grand compromise here, a way out of the all-or-nothing voucher debate, a third way that focuses on the inner-city children who need help the most and allows both public and private schools to flourish.

Thanks to New York philanthropist Virginia Gilder, we have a glimpse of a possible grand compromise in Albany's Giffen Memorial Elementary. Located in one of Albany's saddest neighborhoods, practically in the shadow of the state capital, Giffen was a mess just a year ago, with unruly, crowded classes where children learned little: Less than a half the third graders were meeting minimum state reading standards.

Here's what Gilder offered the Giffen parents: Choose any private school you wish and I will guarantee tuition up to $2,000 a year. That set off a mad scramble that lasted for months, with the school district crying foul and minority parents debating an offer that smelled suspiciously like right-wing raw meat. It's still too early to draw a final conclusion about the Giffen experiment -- or the other voucher programs being funded by philanthropists in-urban areas such as Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. So far 13 children have returned to Giffen, many for disciplinary problems they faced in private schools. And Catholic elementary and middle schools aren't always an option: 40 percent now have waiting lists. But most of the families of the roughly 100 children in the Giffen voucher program appear pleased. "It's wonderful," says Jennifer Davis, whose first-grade son, Brandon, attends St. James Institute, a Catholic elementary school. Not only has Brandon learned to read English, but he's also excited about the Spanish course he takes there. Parents who decided to keep their children at Giffen also have reason to cheer. The Albany school district brought in a vibrant, motivated principal -- who sounds a lot like Houston1s Charlotte Parker -- along with two new assistant principals. The district also transferred seven teachers out of the school, invested $125,000 in fresh materials, established community outreach and literacy programs, and is considering bringing in the highly regarded "Success for All" program to boost reading skills.

Albany school officials, however, are loath to admit the voucher program brought about even a single reform. The most Giffen's new principal, Maxine Fantroy-Ford, will budge on that question is to say, "I think it speeded it up." The seven teachers, says Albany superintendent Lonnie Palmer, were sent to schools with a "less disadvantaged" student population. "We've seen a significant improvement in the disciplinary climate and parental involvement," says Palmer. "We anticipate and hope we will see improvements in test scores in the spring" Like Giffen!s principal, Palmer says the voucher offer only speeded up reforms at Giffen: "Because of the media attention we were able to get greater support from the teacher's union and others to make the changes in a more rapid fashion"

But Palmer's actions speak louder than her words. Fighting it all the way, Palmer nonetheless proves the point of the pro-voucher argument. "The theory of the marketplace can even work in public education," says the Hudson Institute's Chester Finn about Giffen. "The school system responded by giving the school a makeover."

Hence the makings of the grand compromise, a limited voucher experiment with dual aims: offer safety valves to academically ambitious inner-city parents and students, while giving school districts a kick-in-the-pants motivation to seek out more Charlotte Parkers from within their ranks. The notion of a grand education compromise isn't new. Former Clinton advisor Bill Galston and education conservative Diane Ravitch have called for a national experiment to test vouchers in several cities. "A lot of low-income parents have reached the end of their patience with the education status quo," says Galston.

An education compromise may seem unlikely, but it's actually less revolutionary than other recent social developments. Only a few years ago conventional wisdom held that welfare reform was unworkable and a decrease in violent crime impossible. Moreover, the pieces of an education compromise are beginning to line up: While the NAACP is sticking with the unions' anti-voucher line, black leaders have to be nervous about the fast rising support for vouchers among black parents. In Denver, where Sister Mary Ellen continues to embarrass Denver school officials with her success record with African-American students, black parents have brought suit to force the city's school system to grant both the vouchers and the transportation needed to get their children to private school. The most recent Phi Delta Kappa poll shows support for vouchers among blacks jumped from 42 to 62 percent in a single year. "We do not normally get a 20-point swing in one year," said one Phi Delta Kappa pollster.

How long can black leaders stand in the way of what black parents want? No one can say, but former Rep. Floyd Flake of New York, who is pro-voucher, claims that "there is an urgency and desperation on the part of parents to not lose another generation of their children" Prominent black columnist William Raspberry, a longtime defender of public schools, announced his decision on May 30 with a column titled "A Reluctant Convert to School Choice" In fact, there's a heated private debate taking place over vouchers among black leaders. Listen to this hint from Urban League President Hugh Price.: "If urban schools as we know them continue to fail in the face of all we know about how to improve them, then your customers will be obliged to shop elsewhere for a quality education."

Blacks aren't the only ones joining the grand compromise. Those Democrats who have flourished thanks to the support soccer moms have shown them on education issues have to be worried about recent signs that Republicans have figured out how to turn the education issue in their favor. James Gilmore won the Virginia State House with a campaign vowing to put more teachers in classrooms. And Sen. Al D'Amato's pollsters have selected one big issue to once again win reelection against the odds: vilify the teachers' unions.

Granted, the sight of Senator Pothole posing as the Education Senator is not pretty. But consider this: D'Amatos sure-footed pollsters have a solid history of bailing out their man, so they probably know something that should worry the unions. And it may not be that hard to see. How could anyone miss the recent spectacle of 23,000 families applying for 1,300 private-school scholarships in New York?

Does that mean the teachers' unions might see a limited experiment as a good political compromise? Not likely. The unions can be counted on to call in their last favor with the last state legislator to block even limited voucher experiments. American Federation of Teachers President Sandra Feldman calls the Republican interest in vouchers a "cruel hoax," and she's undoubtedly right that many conservatives are more interested in bashing unions than helping innercity children. But that was no cruel hoax happening in Sister Mary Ellen Roach's school.

For the moment, forget about the power politics and imagine yourself having to answer this question. An urban mother who has played by all the rules -- took her pregnancy seriously, read to her child, enforced discipline, nourished academic interest -- comes to you and asks: How can my children learn in these chaotic classrooms? Go ahead, look her in the eye and try to explain this country doesn't owe her child an education.

This grand compromise is not about bashing either teachers or public schools. The sad reality is that there simply aren't enough Charlotte Parkers to go around. While some states, such as Texas, deserve a lot of credit for generating more educators like her, most school districts simply lack the motivation. They need a shot in the arm, and limited voucher programs could be just what the doctor ordered. That's where the compromise kicks in: If Giffen Elementary is any predictor of the future of targeted voucher programs, public schools could end up winners as well. Let's not limit these inner-city voucher programs to the whims of a handful of multimillionaires. Let the public experiments begin.