Charter reformer: Arizona's superintendent of schools points the way to an education revolution.

Mr. Bolick is litigation director at the Institute for Justice in Washington, D.C., which is defending school-choice programs in Wisconsin, Ohio, Arizona, Vermont, and Maine.

LISA Graham Keegan, Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction, is a petite 38-year-old with a big smile and an irreverent wit who enjoys horseplay with her two kids and scuba-diving off Key West. She is also a revolutionary, the most innovative education reformer in the country, pushing a policy agenda that could radically change the politics of education reform nationwide.

Mrs. Keegan has announced that if she wins election to a second term in 1998, she won't take her constitutional oath unless the state adopts the most sweeping education reform in this century: putting an equal amount of education funding behind every child in the state, and letting families choose where to spend it. Or, as Mrs. Keegan puts it, "strapping the money to the child's back and following her wherever she goes."

Child-centered funding would transform the concept of public education fundamentally, from a system of districts and buildings to one that supports education wherever it takes place. It also would shake the education bureaucracy to its core. Mrs. Keegan likes it for both reasons. "Let's focus on children rather than monopolies," she declares. "We ought to be unapologetically focused on that."

Lisa Graham Keegan was steeped in politics from childhood up. Her family hails from Nebraska, where her great-grandfather --apparently the only Democratic renegade in an otherwise Republican lineage -- served in the U.S. Senate. Her father worked in the timber industry and instilled in Lisa a strong sense of individual liberty and political contrariness, preparing her for the political terrain of their adopted state of Arizona.

Lisa Graham's early career was as a speech pathologist, helping victims of brain injury recover their speech skills. She watched from the sidelines as corruption charges were bringing down then -Governor Evan Meacham. Legislative sessions were televised, and she found the level of discourse appalling. "You didn't know whether to listen to them or try to treat them," she says.

Mrs. Graham decided in 1990 to run herself for the state legislature from the heavily Republican Scottsdale district. However, the district was already represented by a longtime GOP incumbent. Party elders tried to dissuade her from running, but in the end, the incumbent withdrew from the race and Mrs. Graham coasted to victory.

Lisa Graham arrived in the legislature just after scandal had implicated a number of Arizona officials. Several legislators resigned, creating a leadership vacuum in the legislature, and Rep. Graham ran for a leadership post in 1993. She lost, but was appointed to head the House Education Committee, where she was shocked at the sad state of the Arizona schools. "There ought to be rioting in the streets," she says. "Not enough people have seen it up close to be scared to death."

AS a first step toward reform, she proposed paring the 700-page education code to 15. The education establishment fiercely resisted, and the proposal was defeated. "Talk about losing your political virginity," she says. Vowing to prove that "they do not run this system," Rep. Graham came back in 1994 with even more systemic reform: school choice.

Along with State Senator Tom Patterson, she pushed relentlessly, earning the sobriquet "voucher queen" and ultimately coming closer to enacting a statewide school-choice program than anyone has anywhere else before or since. The proposal died, one vote short in the House, at 3:00 A.M. on the last day of the 1994 session.

But Republican Governor Fife Symington called the legislature back into session, and Rep. Graham pushed for a "compromise": the nation's most far-reaching charter-school program. Worn down, reform opponents caved and the bill passed overwhelmingly in both chambers.

Watching the education establishment try to water down the program through regulations, Lisa Graham had an inspiration. "Control freak that I am," she says, she decided to run for Superintendent of Public Instruction and implement her program herself.

The position had been controlled by Democrats for two decades, but Rep. Graham was undaunted. The state teachers' union, she figured, was a "paper tiger -- much of their strength is bluff." Rather than being defensive about her stand on school choice, she attacked the education establishment forthrightly for its dismal record, and won by 16 points.

She opened the door for private and nonprofit groups to sponsor charter schools, and created an independent charter-school board to approve applications quickly. In the three years since she took office, already 250 of the state's 1,300 schools have become innovative, lightly regulated charter schools which, according to Goldwater Institute studies, are producing impressive academic results and a positive competitive response from traditional public schools. Furthermore, the schools are growing in popularity: as a selling point, Continental Homes announced recently that five of its new developments would feature charter schools.

Mrs. Keegan (in 1995 she married State Rep. John Keegan, one of the new legislators elected in the wake of the scandal) has been pushing other important initiatives as well: last year, she helped get the legislature to pass a $500 state income-tax credit for contributions to private scholarship funds (the Arizona Supreme Court will soon rule on its constitutionality); she has set stringent quality standards for public schools; and she curtailed a top-down "environmental curriculum" in favor of rebating money to schools to beef up science courses.

But her boldest gambit is her unorthodox stand on tax-equity litigation. In more than two dozen states, liberals have challenged unequal spending among school districts. In New Jersey, for instance, the state's school-finance system twice has been declared unconstitutional, leading to massive tax hikes but no educational improvement. After the New Hampshire Supreme Court last year struck down that state's finance system, Republicans such as Steve Forbes, Lamar Alexander, and John Sununu announced a counterattack under the banner of "local control."

IT'S a tack that's utterly wrongheaded, according to Lisa Keegan. First, she agrees with liberals that funding disparities are a problem. But, more fundamentally, she thinks the mantra of "local control" is a mistake because "local school districts are government-run monopolies" -- a source of the problem, not the solution. "Let's give up on local control and move on to kids," she argues.

So, when Arizona's Supreme Court struck down the state's school-finance system in 1994, she bucked Governor Symington by embracing the decision. She sees the liberals' wager and raises it substantially by saying: Equalize funding, but put it in the hands of parents and the school they choose. This has the effect of replacing "local" school-district control with parental and school-based autonomy.

If state education funding were provided directly to families, as Mrs. Keegan advocates, it would render the local school districts --along with their money-siphoning, special-interest-laden bureaucracies -- largely superfluous. Public dollars directed by parents to public schools would stay in those schools -- under the control of principals and teachers. School districts would receive funding from constituent schools, not vice versa.

Not surprisingly, many public-school teachers like the idea, and most administrators oppose it. Mrs. Keegan's concession is initially not to include private schools in her plan. "We first have to redefine public education as education in the public interest," she says. "Once the infrastructure is there, and parents understand their children are where they are because they signed the form, they'll get used to the concept of choice."

Child-centered education reform will work best where the state contributes significantly to local school funding, less well in places like New Hampshire where local funding still prevails. But overall, Mrs. Keegan's proposal has considerable political advantages, and could give Republicans a new weapon to fight with on an issue that traditionally has favored Democrats. It would steer Republicans away from the temptation of proposing national solutions to local problems (e.g., federally sponsored standards and testing). Meanwhile, funding students rather than schools is likely to appeal viscerally to mainstream Americans -- and it is a far deeper systemic reform than anything the Democrats can offer.

"There's powerful moral authority in saying 'education for all the children,"' says Mrs. Keegan, who compares her proposal to the partial-birth-abortion issue in its potential power. She is pushing to attain three simple, easily understood goals: putting an equal amount of money behind every child, empowering parents to choose their child's school, and letting schools control themselves. "That's focus," she says. "That's what the Republicans need."

Lisa Graham Keegan will provide the first road test of these ideas in November when she runs for re-election, her candidacy symbolically yoked to a ballot initiative for statewide student-centered education funding. A victory would mean this ebullient soccer mom has kicked a crucial support out from under the education establishment, and perhaps pointed the way to its ultimate demise. The teachers unions should regret ever having provoked her.