The new law has several flaws. Government teachers cannot be fired, one reason why teacher absenteeism in government schools is chronically high. In one survey by a Harvard economist, a quarter of government teachers were absent on any given day, and only half were teaching. The law does not address teacher accountability. Teacher unions are too powerful, so politicians dare not discipline them.

Currently, millions of children complete school without being able to read simple paragraphs or do simple sums. Yet the act talks only of access to schools. It is concerned wholly with educational inputs, not outcomes. It provides a right to schooling, but not to education.

Children from richer families perform better because they get private tuition in the evening, sometimes from the very teacher who was absent at school in the morning. The new law prohibits government teachers from giving private tuition. This is supposed to induce them to take teaching in school more seriously. Alas, teachers will break this rule with impunity.

The law mandates quality standards and official certification for all private schools, but none for government schools. Government teachers are armed with the appropriate degrees, while many private school teachers are not.

Yet, in the absence of motivation or accountability, teaching in government schools is so pathetic that many poor parents in urban slums send their children to fee-charging private schools rather than free government schools. Often these private slum schools are of low quality, yet poor people find government schools worse.

The new law says all private schools must reserve a quarter of their seats from first grade onwards for neighbourhood children from "socially and educationally disadvantaged classes" - lower Hindu castes and poor people, who are well over half the population. For these children, the government will reimburse private schools.

This will not be the standard voucher system found in other countries. Indeed, many politicians hate the very word "voucher", and view the 25 per cent reservation as a way of hammering elite schools rather than empowering students through school choice.

Elite private schools fear the system will impose a huge and unwarranted tax on them because the voucher will not cover their actual costs. They will probably appeal to the courts against the new law's reimbursement provisions, and it remains to be seen what view the courts take.

The restructuring ideas currently on the table, unfortunately, have a mediocre track record, at best. And Detroit is the worst of the worst. Something more proven and effective is needed. The families and children are left languishing in the system need and deserve an immediate ticket out.

Full school choice is the only option.

The Detroit Public School System is a failure in every way. Most important, it fails its students; the non-partisan Brookings Institution ranked it at the bottom of the nation's urban school districts and falling behind fastest. Less than a quarter of its students graduate.

Waste, corruption, and theft are endemic to the Detroit Public School System. A recent audit found 257 "employees" are receiving paychecks despite the fact that they seem not to exist. Separate audits of the District's finances have found $600,000 missing or misspent, $158,000 in furniture missing, and over-spending of $1.9 million. A recent FBI investigation led to the indictment of two employees on charges of stealing around $400,000 from the district. That's just what they can prove to date.

Detroit is planning on spending almost $1.3 billion in 2009 on this abject failure. That's $13,500 for each student. How much more money and how many more young lives is Michigan willing to sacrifice to this diseased system?

The money for success is there, but we need to give it to parents to spend on good schools of their choice, rather than the politicians and bureaucrats that have created this mess.

With that kind of money, private schools will rush to open seats and expand capacity to accommodate them. With that kind of money, new private schools would have plenty to spend on start-up costs and deliver a good, honest education.

Michigan needs a donation tax credit program to fund private school choice for Detroit's children, like the successful programs that Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, Rhode Island, Iowa, and Indiana already enjoy.

In order to do that, a constitutional ballot initiative needs to be fast-tracked to allow real school choice in the state. And in the meantime, private philanthropies need to step in to provide scholarships so as many children as possible can escape what tragically passes for a government "service."

We all have to ask if we want the illusion of reform or tangible, certain results. Simply put, school choice works. It saves money and children.

Ten gold-standard studies, which use a method similar to medical drug trials, have analyzed the impact that school choice has on the performance of students who are offered a choice.

The results are decisive; nine out of ten studies find statistically significant positive impacts on at least some students. None finds a negative effect.

School choice also helps the kids who remain in public schools. There are 17 studies that analyze the impact of private school choice on public school performance, and again the conclusion is solidly in favor of choice. Sixteen out of those seventeen studies find that choice actually improves public schools. None finds a negative impact.

And on top of all the academic success, in state after state, study after study, we find that school choice dramatically eases the massive burden on tax payers that has been imposed by inefficient public school districts.

A fiscal analysis of the Cato Institute's broad-based education tax credit program demonstrates that it can save states billions of dollars. Illinois, for instance, could save more than $5.1 billion over the first ten years.

Even small and restricted existing programs save taxpayers millions a year: $32 million in Milwaukee, $39 million in Florida, and more than $30 million in Pennsylvania. In Florida, that means a savings of almost $1.50 for every dollar invested in education through tax credits.

Detroit and Michigan can afford to bring school choice to every child. They can't afford not to.

Given that many states have already instituted pre-K programs, or are committed to doing so, this paper proposes model early education legislation aimed at maximizing their chances for longterm success. The Early Education Tax Credit aims to sustain any potential preschool benefits and establish a solid academic foundation for later success. The program would improve the quality and efficiency of preschool options by harnessing market forces and would pay for itself by using savings generated from the migration of students from public to private schools in grades K–4.

The Early Education Tax Credit approach is unique in meeting the demands of activists for expanded access to high-quality preschool, meeting the needs of children and the preferences of their parents, and meeting the goal of increased educational freedom — all while keeping the budgetary impact low or positive.

• Policy Analysis no. 641 with appendices on the model legislation (PDF, 874KB )
• Policy Analysis no. 641 without appendices (PDF, 744KB )
Appendices on the model legislation:
• Appendix A: The Early Education Tax Credit Act (PDF, 78KB )
• Appendix B: The EETC in Action (PDF, 32KB )

However well-intentioned, their effort isn't just futile; it's also counterproductive.

Far from being an engine of wealth creation, the education system is bleeding the economy to death. The U.S. spends 2.3 times as much per pupil in real, inflation-adjusted dollars as it spent in 1970, but the return on this ballooning investment has been less than nothing.

Student achievement at the end of high school has been flat for nearly 40 years, according to a recent study by the Education Department, while the graduation rate fell over the same period, according to a report by James Heckman, a Nobel laureate economist.

If the efficiency of U.S. public schooling had merely remained at its 1970 level, the country would enjoy the equivalent of an annual $300 billion tax cut.

The productivity collapse in education is more than staggering; it's unparalleled. Can you name any other service or product that has gotten worse and less affordable over the past two generations? The reason you can't is that no other field is organized as a state-run monopoly.

The general argument against monopolies is well understood and accepted. A concrete case study might drive home the point that monopolies are just as harmful in education as in other fields.

Markets Vs. Monopolies

Earlier this year, I sifted through the 2008-09 budget for the District of Columbia, summing up all K-12 education spending, not counting charter schools. It comes to just under $1.3 billion.

The latest audited enrollment count for the district is 44,681, putting per-pupil spending in the nation's capital at about $29,000. Meanwhile, fewer than half of the students who enter the ninth grade in D.C. go on to graduate four years later.

To put that profligacy in perspective, the private schools serving D.C.'s 1,700 voucher students charge an average tuition of $6,600, according to a recent Education Department. After three years in the program, voucher students read more than two school years ahead of a randomized control group of their public school peers.

That is, the voucher program yields substantially better results at less than one-quarter the cost.

For those unfamiliar with the D.C. voucher program, it is the one that President Obama has decided to phase out, despite his stated goal of pursuing education reform that's effective and efficient.

The massive productivity advantage of private-sector education is not unique to Washington, D.C.

For the Journal of School Choice, I tabulated the international scientific research comparing public and private-sector schooling. Across time, countries and outcome measures, private provision outshines public in the overwhelming majority of cases.

More important, the least regulated, most marketlike education systems show the greatest margin of superiority over monopoly schooling. In literature on education, 59 findings show that markets outperform school monopolies. Not a single study has found a monopoly school system to be as efficient as a market system.

Free The Schools

Once upon a time, America could afford to sustain a parasitic school monopoly, fecklessly throwing billions more dollars at it decade after decade despite its failure to improve. That time has passed. Now that the economy is in a deep recession, the perpetuation of that monopoly puts our economic future at unacceptable risk.

Many policy proposals are on the table that could inject market forces back into the field of education, bringing to it the same long-term productivity growth that has been the norm in other fields.

Some states already have such programs operating on a tiny scale, such as Illinois' modest tax credits for families' own education costs, and the tax credits in Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania for donations to K-12 tuition-assistance organizations serving low-income families.

The first states to combine and expand these programs on a grand scale will become magnets for businesses in search of better-educated workers and lower taxes, leading to an economic and educational boom. The states that don't will continue to burn in the budgetary hell created by monopoly schooling, needlessly jeopardizing their children's economic and educational futures.

It's time to bring the field of education into the fold of the free enterprise system.

The bright spot for vouchers in recent years has been the success of special-needs programs. Yet the Arizona Supreme Court ruled recently that school vouchers for disabled and foster children violate the state constitution, which forbids public money from aiding private schools.

Naturally, the pessimists and opponents of choice are forecasting the death of the voucher movement. They're wrong, because there never was a voucher movement to begin with. It has always been movement for educational freedom, and it is still going strong.

Over the past several years, there has been a gradual shift in focus from vouchers to an alternative mechanism: education tax credits. Illinois, Minnesota and Iowa already provide families with tax credits to offset the cost of independent schooling for their own kids. Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona and three other states provide tax credits for donations to nonprofit scholarship organizations that subsidize tuition for lower-income families.

The fundamental difference between these programs and vouchers is that while vouchers use public money, credits do not. Credits are targeted tax cuts, and no public dollars are spent with them. That single distinction is the reason Arizona's Supreme Court struck down two voucher programs in March, but upheld the state's scholarship donation tax credit program in 1999.

In fact, tax credit programs have withstood every lawsuit raised against them. Since 1995, seven tax credit programs have been passed and all are still in operation. Four voucher programs (in Florida, Colorado and now two in Arizona) have been struck down by the courts in that same time.

This does not mean that credits are invulnerable. Arizona credits just received a temporary setback from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that is sure to be reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court, as is the case with so many other 9th Circuit Court decisions. Vouchers have certainly enjoyed some important legal victories, but vouchers' use of government funds opens them up for attacks to which credits are far less susceptible.

Credit programs have not simply survived, they have thrived. Scholarship donation programs now support more than three times as many low-income children as do voucher programs, though they are generally of more recent vintage. Direct K-12 education tax credits are benefiting hundreds of thousands of families, albeit in more modest dollar amounts.

However, these are not the only reasons that supporters of educational freedom have increasingly begun to favor credits over vouchers. Credits better preserve the autonomy of independent schools, and they extend choice and accountability to taxpayers as well as parents. Taxpayers get to choose to participate in credit programs as well as pick the recipient organization for their funds if they do. In addition, credits command increasingly bipartisan political support.

So while advocates of educational freedom regret that vouchers have been under heavy fire in many states, tax credit programs can be created or expanded to accommodate the children formerly served by vouchers.

The voucher students have little brothers and sisters. They have neighbors and friends. Under the president's proposal, none of those children would ever enjoy the chances that voucher recipients like Mercedes Campbell have had.

In an interview with ReasonTV, Mercedes said the opportunity to attend a private school has transformed her. "It's different, now that I go to Visitation.... It's like a whole new world."

Unless something is done, most poor kids in DC will never glimpse that world, let alone live in it. House Minority Leader John Boehner, of Ohio, has proposed a bill to reauthorize the voucher program, but it faces a stiff headwind as long as Democrats in Congress defer to teacher union opposition.

But there is another option: The District of Columbia can create its own scholarship program.

Can DC afford it? Average tuition at voucher-accepting schools is about $6,600, according to a federal study released last month. By contrast, the city is currently spending about $1.3 billion on k-12 education, for fewer than 49,000 students.

That works out to well over $26,000 per pupil -- comparable to tuition at the prestigious Sidwell Friends school to which the president sends his own daughters, Sasha and Malia. So DC could easily offer a voucher even larger than the one currently provided by the federal government.

Is it politically viable? Perhaps. Though Democrats in Congress are almost universally opposed to school choice programs, the same is not true at the state and local levels. Speakers at the rally to save the voucher program included DC councilman Marion Barry, former mayor Anthony Williams (who was instrumental in creating the federal program), former councilman Kevin Chavous, and civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis.

And just two weeks ago, the Florida legislature passed a bill strengthening that state's private school choice tax credit program, with the support of nearly half the Democratic caucus in the house, and two thirds of African American Democrats. The biggest champions of a similar program in New Jersey are Democratic Mayor Corey Booker, and fellow Democratic state senator Raymond Lesniak.

The political dynamics are different in city halls and statehouses than they are on Capitol Hill. The unions may lobby just as fiercely in every case, but the pushback from constituents is stronger at lower levels of government.

Few seats in the U.S. House or Senate are decided on the basis of education platforms, but education plays a larger role in the election of state and local officials. As parents get angrier and demand educational alternatives for their kids, politicians outside of Congress are more apt to take notice.

What's more, DC already has what amounts to a targeted school voucher program -- and it's larger than the federal voucher program that President Obama wishes to phase out. The District currently sends nearly 2,500 special needs students to private schools because it is not able to serve them itself. The program is uncontroversial.

Why not extend to all families a choice currently enjoyed by so few? The Department of Education's recent study shows that students who have been in the voucher program since it began in 2004 are performing more than two school years ahead of their public school counterparts in reading. There is unconscionable to deny that benefit to other students.

When the "common school" reformers began their campaign for state-run schooling more than 200 years ago, one of their core goals was to ensure that the education of America's poorest citizens did not fall by the wayside.

Despite the best efforts of generation after generation of subsequent reformers, that goal remains unmet for far too many children. We can't wait any longer. DC kids can't wait any longer.

Oddly, my "discovery" of private schools serving the poor was no discovery at all, or at least not to some people.

Leaving Hyderabad, I returned to Delhi to meet again with World Bank staff before moving on to continue my "field trip" in other countries.

I was eager and excited to tell them what I'd discovered in the back streets of the Old City of Hyderabad and to gain their insights on the way forward.

They weren't at all impressed. I met with a group of staff members in their pleasant offices, replete with potted ferns and pretty posters of cute children. Most, it was true, had never heard of private schools serving the poor, and they were frankly puzzled about how schools charging only $10 a year could exist, except through charity.

And they told me that I had found some nongovernmental organizations working in the slums, opening a few schools, that was all. They told me this, assuming I was simply misguided, even though I had told them it was something else altogether.

However, one of the group, Sajitha Bashir, had herself seen a few private schools in Tamil Nadu — although she insisted there were none in Karnataka, where she was now doing a study, so they weren't a universal phenomenon.

In front of the group, she launched into a tirade against such schools. They were ripping off the poor, she said, run by unscrupulous businesspeople who didn't care a fig for anything other than profits.

This didn't gel at all with what I'd seen in Hyderabad — how could such people devote their weekends to science competitions and cyber-olympics if money was their sole motivation? I was not at all convinced and hesitantly related some details of what I'd found. No one considered my information very significant. Those who hadn't heard of these schools simply shrugged, and the meeting soon dissolved.

Afterward, Sajitha took me downstairs for coffee, clearly trying to be helpful in letting me see the errors of my ways.

So the private schools might be there, some might even be better than the public schools, but that's only because they are selective "They take the cream of the cream," she said (and I had to force myself to remember that we were talking about parents earning a dollar or two a day), leaving the public schools much worse off.

Anyway, continuing the theme that only a few were any good, she continued, "Most of the schools are shocking, there is a shocking turnover of teachers, they're not trained, they're not committed, and the proprietors know that they can simply get others because there is a long list of people waiting to come in."

But her main problem, clearly based on well-intentioned personal convictions, was the question of equality. Because some children, the poorest of the poor, are left behind in the "sink" public schools, the private schools were exacerbating inequality, not improving the situation at all, she said.

For that reason, we must devote all our efforts toward improving the public schools, not get carried away by what was happening in a few private schools.

For Sajitha it was clear: If many — or even a few — parents had higher aspirations for their children and wanted to send them to private schools, then "they should not be allowed to do so, because this is unfair."

It's unfair because it makes it even worse for those left behind. This puzzled me. Why should we treat the poor in this homogenous way? Would we — Sajitha and I — be happy if we were poor, living in those slums, and unable to do the best for our children, whatever our meager funds allowed? But I said nothing.

As we parted, amicably enough, she told me that there was quite a bit of development literature about private schools for the poor in any case, and so I shouldn't go on too much about my "discovery" as I had done today, as people would only laugh. She gave me a couple of references to look up.

And she was right. I wondered at my own poor detective work in not having located these references before. Perhaps my own lack of recognition for what was taking place was excusable. In the writings she pointed me to, and subsequent ones that I found, discussion of private schools for the poor was somehow veiled, or referred to tangentially, and ignored in subsequent writings.

It was certainly not headlined in any conclusions or policy implications — to which many of us lazily turn when we digest development writings. It was almost as if the writers concerned were embarrassed or bewildered by private schools for the poor.

They could write about these schools in passing, but instead of their leaping out at them as some thing of great significance — as they had to me when I first "discovered" them in Hyderabad — they didn't seem to impinge in any significant way on the writers' policy proposals or future discussions.

Even for those who didn't deny the existence of private schools for the poor, everyone, it seemed, altogether denied their significance.

The more I explored those references, the more baffled I became. It was one thing to argue that "education for all" could be secured only through public education supported by international aid if you were unaware of private schools for the poor.

But as soon as you knew that many poor parents were exiting the state system to send their children to private schools, then surely this must register on your radar as being worthy of comment in the "education for all" debate? Apparently not.

I read the Public Report on Basic Education (the PROBE Report), a detailed survey of educational provision in four northern Indian states, with growing amazement. It too was clear that "even among poor families and disadvantaged communities, one finds parents who make great sacrifices to send some or all of their children to private schools, so disillusioned are they with government schools."

Here was another source pointing to the phenomenon of private schools for the poor — why weren't they better known then? The PROBE team's findings on the quality of public schools were even more startling. When their researchers had called unannounced on a large random sample of government schools, in only half was there any "teaching activity" at all!

In fully one-third, the principal was absent. The report gave touching examples of parents who were struggling against the odds to keep children in school, but whose children were clearly learning next to nothing. Children's work was "at best casually checked."

The team reported "several cases of irresponsible teachers keeping a school closed or non-functional for several months at a time", one school "where the teacher was drunk", another where the principal got the children to do his domestic chores, "including looking after the baby."

The team observed that in the government schools, "generally, teaching activity has been reduced to a minimum, in terms of both time and effort."Importantly, "this pattern is not confined to a minority of irresponsible teachers — it has become a way of life in the profession." But they did not observe such problems in the private schools serving the poor.

When their researchers called unannounced on their random sample of private unaided (that is, receiving no government funding) schools in the villages, "feverish classroom activity" was always taking place.

So what was the secret of success in these private schools for the poor? The report was very clear: "In a private school, the teachers are accountable to the manager (who can fire them), and, through him or her, to the parents (who can withdraw their children)."

"In a government school, the chain of accountability is much weaker, as teachers have a permanent job with salaries and promotions unrelated to performance. This contrast is perceived with crystal clarity by the vast majority of parents."

I read the summaries at the beginning and end of The Oxfam Education Report, a standard textbook for development educationalists, and again I found only the accepted wisdom that governments and international agencies must meet the educational needs of the poor.

The introduction states that there is an educational crisis because governments and international agencies have broken their promises "to provide free and compulsory basic education." Then in the conclusion, I read that there is hope, but only if countries, rich and poor alike, renew their commitment to "free and compulsory education."

As long as national governments spend more, and richer countries contribute billions more in aid per year, then we can achieve universal primary education by 2015. There is nothing exceptional about that, I thought as I read.

But then again, hidden away in a chapter titled "National Barriers to Basic Education," was the extraordinary (but downplayed) observation: "The notion that private schools are servicing the needs of a small minority of wealthy parents is misplaced�It is interesting to note that a lower-cost private sector has emerged to meet the demands of poor households."

Indeed, there is "a growing market for private education among poor households." The author of the report, Kevin Watkins, pointed to research indicating large proportions of poor children enrolled in private schools and commented, "Such findings indicate that private education is a far more pervasive fact of life than is often recognized."

I put the book down and thought, that's unexpected, isn't it? Something as surprising as large numbers of the poor using private schools is surely worthy of comment in the conclusions, isn't it? Not a bit. The fact that the poor are helping themselves in this way was deemed unworthy of further mention in the introduction or conclusions. It was all a non-issue as far as the Oxfam Education Report was concerned.

The consensus on this surprising phenomenon, coupled with the consensus that it lacked any real significance, struck me as incredible after my first visit to Hyderabad. That poor parents in some of the most destitute places on this planet are flocking to private schools because public schools are inadequate and unaccountable seemed to me to be hugely significant territory for development experts to concede.

The PROBE Report showed that private schools existed and were doing a much better job than government schools, but it nevertheless concluded that we must not be misled into thinking that there is a "soft option" of entrusting elementary education to private schools.

It conceded that, although it had painted a "relatively rosy" picture of the private sector (where there was a "high level of classroom activity�better utilization of facilities, greater attention to young children, responsiveness of teachers to parental complaints") this definitely did not mean that private education was an answer to the problem of providing education for all.

The more I read the more it appeared that development experts were missing an obvious conclusion: If we wish to reach the "education for all" target of universal quality primary education by 2015, as agreed to by governments and non-governmental organizations in 2000, surely we should be looking to the private sector to play a significant role, given the clear importance of its role already?

Couldn't we be the trumpeting parents' choices, rather than simply ignoring what they were doing?

This is the final part of a three-part series from James Tooley's book, The Beautiful Tree.

Mr. Fazalur Rahman Khurrum was the president of an association specifically set up to cater to private schools serving the poor — the Federation of Private Schools' Management, which boasted a membership of over 500 schools all serving low-income families.

Once word got around that a foreign visitor was interested in seeing private schools, Khurrum was inundated with requests for me to visit.

I spent as much time as I could over the next 10 days or so with Khurrum traveling the length and breadth of the Old City, in between doing my work for the International Finance Corporation in the new city. We visited nearly 50 private schools in some of the poorest parts of town, driving endlessly down narrow streets to schools whose owners were apparently anxious to meet me.

(Our rented car was a large white Ambassador — the Indian vehicle modeled on the old British Morris Minor, proudly used by government officials when an Indian flag on the hood signified the importance of its user — horn blaring constantly, as much to signify our own importance as to get children and animals out of the way.)

There seemed to be a private school on almost every street corner, just as in the richer parts of the city.

I visited so many, being greeted at narrow entrances by so many students, who marched me into tiny playgrounds, beating their drums, to a seat in front of the school, where I was welcomed in ceremonies officiated by senior students, while school managers garlanded me with flowers, heavy, prickly and sticky around my neck in the hot sun, which I bore stoically as I did the rounds of the classrooms.

So many private schools, some had beautiful names. Like Little Nightingale's High School, named after Sarojini Naidu, a famous "freedom fighter" in the 1940s, known by Nehru as the "Little Nightingale" for her tender English songs. Or Firdaus Flowers Convent School, that is, "flowers of heaven." The "convent" part of the name puzzled me at first, as did the many names such as St. Maria's or St. John's.

It seemed odd, since these schools were clearly run by Muslims — indeed, for a while I fostered the illusion that these saints and nuns must be in the Islamic tradition too.

But no, the names were chosen because of the connotations to parents — the old Catholic and Anglican schools were still viewed as great schools in the city, so their religious names were borrowed to signify quality to the parents. But did they really deliver a quality education? I needed to find out.

One of the first schools Khurrum took me to was Peace High School, run by 27-year-old Mohammed Wajid. Like many I was to visit, the school was in a converted family home, fronting on Edi Bazaar, the main but narrow, bustling thoroughfare that stretched out behind the Charminar. A bold sign proclaimed the school's name.

Through a narrow metal gate, I entered a small courtyard, where Wajid had provided some simple slides and swings for the children to play on. By the far wall were hutches of pet rabbits for the children to look after. Wajid's office was to one side, the family's rooms on the other. We climbed a narrow, dark, dirty staircase to enter the classrooms.

They too were dark, with no doors, and noise from the streets easily penetrated the barred but unglazed windows. The children all seemed incredibly pleased to see their foreign visitor and stood to greet me warmly.

The walls were painted white but were discolored by pollution, heat, and the general wear-and-tear of children. From the open top floor of his building, Wajid pointed out the locations of five other private schools, all anxious to serve the same students in his neighborhood.

Wajid was quietly unassuming, but clearly caring and devoted to his children. He told me that his mother founded Peace High School in 1973 to provide "a peaceful oasis in the slums" for the children. Wajid, her youngest son, began teaching in the school in 1988, when he was himself a 10th-grade student in another private school nearby.

Having then received his bachelor's in commerce at a local university college and begun training as an accountant, his mother asked him to take over the school in 1998, when she felt she must retire from active service. She asked him to consider the "less blessed" people in the slums, and that his highest ambition should be to help them, as befitting his Muslim faith.

This seemed to have come as a blow to his ambitions. His elder brothers had all pursued careers, and several were now living overseas in Dubai, London and Paris, working in the jewelry business. But Wajid felt obliged to follow his mother's wishes and so began running the school. He was still a bachelor, he told me, because he wanted to build up his school. Only when his financial prospects were certain could he marry.

The school was called a high school, but like others bearing this name, it included kindergarten to 10th grade. Wajid had 285 children and 13 teachers when I first met him, and he also taught mathematics to the older children.

His fees ranged from 60 rupees to 100 rupees per month ($1.33 to $2.22 at the exchange rates then), depending on the children's grade, the lowest for kindergarten and rising as the children progressed through school.

These fees were affordable to parents, he told me, who were largely day laborers and rickshaw pullers, market traders and mechanics — earning perhaps a dollar a day. Parents, I was told, valued education highly and would scrimp and save to ensure that their children got the best education they could afford.

This is the second part in a three-part series from James Tooley's book, The Beautiful Tree.

After a stint teaching philosophy of education at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, I returned to England to complete my doctorate and later became a professor of education.

Thanks to my experiences in sub-Saharan Africa and my modest but respect able academic reputation, I was offered a commission by the World Bank's International Finance Corporation to study private schools in a dozen developing countries.

The lure of faraway places was too enticing to resist, but I was troubled by the project itself. Although I was to study private schools in developing countries, those schools were serving the middle classes and the elite. Despite my lifelong desire to help the poor, I'd somehow wound up researching bastions of privilege.

The first leg of the trip began in New York in January 2000. As if to reinforce my misgivings that the project would do little for the poor, I was flown first class to London in the inordinate luxury of the Concorde.

Forty minutes into the flight, as we cruised at twice the speed of sound and two miles above conventional air traffic, caviar and champagne were served. The boxer Mike Tyson (sitting at the front with a towel over his head for much of the journey) and singer George Michael were on the same flight. I felt lost.

From London it was on to Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai. By day, I evaluated five-star private schools and colleges that were very definitely for the privileged. By night, I was put up in unbelievably salubrious and attentive five-star hotels.

But in the evenings, sifting and chaffing with street children outside these very same hotels, I wondered what effect any of my work could have on the poor, whose desperate needs I saw all around me. I didn't just want my work to be a defense of privilege. The middle-class Indians, I felt, were wealthy already.

To me it all seemed a bit of a con: Just because they were in a "poor" country, they were able to latch onto this international assistance even though they as individuals had no pressing need for it at all. I didn't like it, but as I returned to my room and lay on the 500-thread-count Egyptian-cotton sheets, my discomfort with the program was forced to compete with a mounting sense of self-criticism.

Then one day, everything changed. Arriving in Hyderabad to evaluate brand-new private colleges at the forefront of India's hi-tech revolution, I learned that January 26th was Republic Day, a national holiday.

Left with some free time, I decided to take an autorickshaw — the three-wheeled taxis ubiquitous in India — from my posh hotel in Banjara Hills to the Charminar, the triumphal arch built at the center of Muhammad Quli Shah's city in 1591.

My Rough Guide to India described it as Hyderabad's "must see" attraction, and also warned that it was situated in the teeming heart of the Old City slums. That appealed to me. I wanted to see the slums for myself.

As we traveled through the middle-class suburbs, I was struck by the ubiquity of private schools. Their signboards were on every street corner, some on fine specially constructed school buildings, but others grandly posted above shops and offices.

Of course, it was nothing more than I'd been led to expect from my meetings in India already — senior government officials had impressed me with their candor when they told me it was common knowledge that even the middle classes were all sending their children to private schools. They all did themselves. But it was still surprising to see how many there were.

We crossed the bridge over the stinking ditch that is the once-proud River Musi. Here were autorickshaws in abundance, cattle drawn carts meandering slowly with huge loads of hay, rickshaws agonizingly peddled by painfully thin men.

My driver let me out, and told me he'd wait for an hour, but then called me back in a bewildered tone as I headed not to the Charminar but into the back streets behind. No, no, I assured him, this is where I was going, into the slums of the Old City. For the stunning thing about the drive was that private schools had not thinned out as we went from one of the poshest parts of town to the poorest.

Every where among the little stores and workshops were little private schools! I could see handwritten signs pointing to them even here on the edge of the slums. I was amazed, but also confused: Why had no one I worked with in India told me about them?

The young men at the bean-and-vegetable counter hailed me and said there was definitely someone at the Royal Grammar School just nearby, and that it was a very good private school and I should visit.

They gave me directions, and I bade farewell. But I became muddled by the multiplicity of possible right turns down alleyways followed by sharp lefts, and so asked the way of a couple of fat old men sitting alongside a butcher shop.

Their shop was the dirtiest thing I had ever seen, with entrails and various bits and pieces of meat spread out on a mucky table over which literally thousands of flies swarmed. The stench was terrible. No one else seemed the least bit bothered by it. They immediately understood where I wanted to go and summoned a young boy who was headed in the opposite direction to take me there.

He agreed without demur, and we walked quickly, not talking at all as he spoke no English. In the next street, young boys played cricket with stones as wickets and a plastic ball. One of them called me over, to shake my hand.

Then we turned down another alleyway (with more boys playing cricket between makeshift houses outside of which men bathed and women did their laundry) and arrived at the Royal Grammar School, which proudly advertised, "English Medium, Recognized by the Gov't of AP." The owner, or "correspondent" as I soon came to realize he was called in Hyderabad, was in his tiny office. He enthusiastically welcomed me.

Through that chance meeting, I was introduced to the warm, kind and quietly charismatic Mr. Fazalur Rahman Khurrum and to a huge network of private schools in the slums and low-income areas of the Old City. The more time I spent with him, the more I realized that my expertise in private education might after all have something to say about my concern for the poor.

This is the first part in a three-part series from James Tooley's book, The Beautiful Tree.

During the campaign, Obama said that if vouchers worked he would support them. The Education Department recently revealed that students who joined the voucher program in 2004 are now more than two school years ahead of their public school peers in reading.

In his initial budget, Obama declared that when it comes to education, we cannot waste dollars on programs that are inefficient. Average tuition at the voucher schools is $6,620, while the District is spending $26,555 per pupil this year on K-12 education.

So contrary to his promises, the president has sacrificed a program he knows to be efficient and successful in order to appease the public school employee unions. If he will do this for the NEA, he will do anything.

America finally has an "education president," and his name is Dennis Van Roekel.

In fact, state spending is excessive. Rather than raising taxes, Massachusetts can balance its budget by reducing expenditures that should be cut independent of the current fiscal situation.

Consider first recent history. Between 2004 and 2009, state expenditures increased by about 13 percent in real, per capita terms. Massachusetts was already a high expenditure state in 2005, ranking in the top 10. Expenditure cuts would hardly produce a bare-bones, minimalist government.

Many expenditure items have no compelling justification, but they also have minimal impact on the budget (e.g., skating rinks and golf courses). To make a real difference, expenditure cuts must target health and education, which account for about 48 percent and 22 percent of the total budget, respectively.

Health expenditures in particular have grown rapidly. Subsidizing health insurance for the poor is a defensible way to redistribute income. Further, an insurance mandate like the one adopted in Massachusetts can overcome private sector reluctance to offer reasonably priced insurance to small businesses and individuals.

Yet health insurance causes excessive health expenditure. Patients demand more care because they do not pay the full price. Doctors recommend extra procedures and tests, partially to avoid liability, partially because patients are not sensitive to price.

Subsidizing insurance exacerbates this problem. In deciding how much to subsidize health insurance, therefore, government faces a trade-off: The more it subsidizes, the more it distorts health care markets.

Society must balance its desire to provide affordable health care against other social goals. The obvious way to achieve this balance is to limit subsidized health insurance to the truly poor. Massachusetts has expanded coverage to families with incomes up to three times the poverty level. At a minimum, Massachusetts should significantly ramp up co-pays and deductibles for those above the poverty line.

In education, two key changes make sense on the merits and would reduce expenditures substantially.

At the K-12 level, Massachusetts should increase the number of charter schools or, better yet, introduce vouchers. This would enhance choice, variety and innovation in publicly funded education. Vouchers and charter schools reduce expenditures by hiring non-unionized and alternative certification teachers. With an expanded pool of qualified teachers, Massachusetts can spend less while improving the quality of teaching.

At the higher education level, state colleges and universities should set higher tuition rates, commensurate with those at private schools, while aiding deserving students. Under the current policy of setting below-market tuition, middle- and high-income families receive a large subsidy from the general taxpayer. Such redistribution makes no sense.

Private companies throughout the economy are using the recession to identify wasteful or inefficient projects; Massachusetts should do the same. Every entity, public or private, ends up with too much expenditure in good times, and this is understandable. The right response in bad times, however, is to cut excessive expenditures, not raise taxes.

Obama's overwhelming education focus has been on getting roughly $100 billion directed to education through the American Recover and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). But he and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, haven't just turned on the money hose. They've poured on the rhetoric as well.

"The time for holding us — holding ourselves accountable is here," the President told the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March. "What's required is not simply new investments, but new reforms. It's time to expect more from our students. It's time to start rewarding good teachers, stop making excuses for bad ones. It's time to demand results from government at every level."

That all sounds great. But how do you make all that good stuff really happen?

The first thing you don't do is bail out massive inefficiency and failure, but that's exactly what Obama's ceiling-shattering "investment" is doing. Spending billions upon billions to save jobs in a system that's seen huge staffing increases, skyrocketing per-pupil expenditures, but student-achievement stagnation is not forcing reform, it's rewarding failure.

Ah, but there are reform requirements attached to all that dough! States have to promise to address teacher-quality issues, establish student-progress data systems, set "rigorous" standards, and help "turn around" bad schools. And states that seem to do a good job will be eligible for a slice of the $4.35 billion "Race-to-the-Top" fund controlled by Secretary Duncan.

But we've been hearing tough talk like this for decades and not a lot has gotten better. Is there much reason to believe that Obama will finally make the jump from rhetoric to real reform?

Nope. When government runs the schools political power is all that matters, and that resides with teachers, administrators, and other public-school employees. They have by far the most money and motivation to engage in education politics, and what's best for them is to get as much funding, and as little accountability, as possible. Considering how much cash Obama has already given them, the President seems well under their control.

Thankfully, there is a way to change the system so that power no longer resides with the very people politicians are supposed to be holding accountable. Instead of giving tax dollars to public schools, let parents control the cash. Enable parents to choose schools, and force school employees to respond to them. It's real reform that's been shown to work

Unfortunately, in his first one-hundred days Obama failed to fight for just such meaningful reform. The president did nothing to defend Washington DC's school voucher program, which provides real school choice for 1,700 education-starved kids. Indeed, what his administration did was worse than nothing: it buried a report showing vouchers' success just as Congress was debating the program's fate, and barred 200 children who had won vouchers from using them in the coming school year.

"It didn't make sense to me to put more students in the program," explained Secretary Duncan.

But here's what really doesn't make sense: spending unprecedented billions to save a hopeless system while letting real reform die. Unfortunately, such has been Obama's first 100 days.

But is it really so grim? After all, my research had shown that significant numbers of parents had tried free primary education in the public schools but had decided to move their children back to the private schools. Surely, they weren't doing something so counterintuitive if they thought that the private schools really were hopeless? My research assistant from Newcastle, James Stanfield, and I decided to interview groups of parents in four schools that had reported parents' returning their children, having moved them first to the government schools. These parents at least were clear that they had behaved rationally moving back to private school.

In each discussion, parents eagerly told us how the education being offered in the slum private schools was higher quality than in the neighboring government schools — however much the buildings' appearances might suggest the contrary. Not one parent expressed the opposite view.

One mother told us: "I have two children who joined this school since their nursery level and they are still in this school today. I see them doing good in subjects. Their time and subjects are well planned; they spend time well and are taught all subjects. . . . For those reasons this private school has impressed me a lot. I have saved money and cut many costs of my maintenance in order to bring children in this private school. Even though people might question why I send children in private school while there are free [government] schools, I am concerned with high-quality subject teaching offered in this private school."

We asked parents to elaborate on what particular features made the private schools preferable. One mother told us: "People thought education is free; it may be free but children do not learn. This makes the quality of education poor and that is why many parents have brought their children back here. People got their children out of the private schools to the public schools because of free education.... However, the children do not learn; all they do is play." Other parents agreed. A father told us: "While most of the teachers in government school are just resting and doing their own things, in private school our teachers are very much busy doing their best, because they know we pay them by ourselves. If they don't do well they can get the message from the headmistress, of which we cannot allow because we produce ourselves the money, we get it through our own sweat, we cannot allow to throw it away, because you can't even take the money from the trees, you have to work harder to find it so the teacher must also work harder on our children so that he earns his own living." A mother agreed: "You will never see [in a private school] a teacher working on something else like sewing a sweater while she is supposed to be in class."

But how did parents know the quality in the private schools was better than in government schools? We asked them for details. Parents, it turned out, actively compared children in the government schools with children in the private schools in their neighborhoods. One mother commented: "If you make a comparison between a child attending private school and one who is in government school by asking them some questions from their subjects you will find the one in private school is doing very good, while the one from government school is poor. Even when you compare their examinations scores you will be able to see private school pupil is performing well while that from government is poor."

Another gave a similar story: "I am living next to parents who send their children to a government school, and I always compare their children with mine who are attending private school. I always find private schools teach better than government schools from these comparisons. Government school children are always smart dressed in good uniforms but when you ask them some questions, you will realize that they know nothing. Those attending a private school are usually not smartly dressed, but they are good in school subjects."

Finally, parents were learning from the experience of those who had moved between the two systems. One mother told us that she had a sister who used to be a pupil in Olympic, the government school bordering Kibera: "She told me that there is a difference in the teaching. In Olympic, teachers do not concentrate on the pupils and so her performance started going down. She told me when she moved to the private school, the teacher teaches well; let's say it was an English class; the teacher teaches well and spends enough time with the children but when he was in the government school, the teacher does not spend much time with them; as long as she has seen she has taught something, she walks out of class."

But it wasn't just the perceived higher standards in the private schools that attracted parents. Parents also told us of the ways in which private school managers were sensitive to the plight of parents who could not afford to pay their fees on time, a point in favor of sending children to private schools. One mother remarked: "I am thankful to the head teacher [of the private school] very much for being very considerate to parents. You will never see a child not in school because of delay paying school fees. In those cases, the head teacher will write to the parent to ask them to meet with her to discuss when the fees can be paid." A father concurred, "Here, with the little money we earn we can pay bit by bit." And then there was the concern about the "hidden" costs of the supposedly free education in government schools. One of the main requirements was school uniforms — and it was argued by parents that, in their view, government schools were using the inability of poor parents to meet uniform requirements in full to turn them away. One mother pointed out, "In a private school, a child is allowed to attend school with only one uniform while in the government school he must have two uniforms before he is allowed to attend school." Another agreed: "Even if learning there [in the government schools] is free, school uniform is expensive and you have to buy full school uniform at once. I prefer to pay fees and buy the school uniform bit by bit."

One mother enumerated what she saw as the costs that she would incur if she sent her child to a government school: "I went there [to a government school] to see [and] they told me I had to have 11,000 Kenyan shillings [$143.23] cash in hand." Partly, she reported, this charge was for the building maintenance fund. She continued that once you'd "bought a school uniform," you still had to buy ''the school sweater, which costs 600 Kenyan shillings [$7.81], and you have to make sure you have two sweaters, which is 1,200 Kenyan shillings [$15.62]. Good leather shoes and socks two pairs. You have to have two of everything." In short, the mother argued about government schooling, "I don't think it's free." One father summed it all rather neatly as to why he still preferred private schooling for his daughter rather than what was provided free in the public school: "If you go to a market and are offered free fruit and vegetables, they will be rotten. If you want fresh fruit and vegetables, you have to pay for them."

The D.C. voucher death sentence is a disappointment for the movement and a tragedy for the children. However, the elite reaction to this school-choice defeat reveals how far school choice has advanced. Support for school choice has mainstreamed, and it's only a matter of time before the political barriers are brought down.

The fate of the D.C. voucher program captured widespread attention in recent weeks as news of the Congressional hit job became known. And rather than a strict conservative/liberal face-off on this traditionally free-market issue, we saw a surprising amount of school choice support from mainstream, even center-left, sources.

The Washington Post, for instance, led early with an editorial denouncing the poorly concealed effort by Congressional Democrats to kill school choice in the District. In a second editorial, they asked that Democrats save their "phony concern about the children" and admit it's all about politics and paying off the teachers unions.

The Chicago Tribune followed with full-throated support of D.C. vouchers. A paper that expressed, in its endorsement of Obama, "tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions" notes the rank hypocrisy of a President Obama who sends his own children to an expensive private school while kowtowing to the unions in his opposition to school choice for those without independent means.

In a surprising turn, even Arne Duncan, secretary of education in Obama's administration, publicly opposed taking vouchers away from kids in the program.

Elite opinion matters; it is the foodstuff of mass public opinion. And it is of particular importance when the composition of elite communication begins to shift.

The academic guru of mass opinion, University of California Berkley professor John Zaller, explains that public political opinion can, to a large extent, be explained by the flow of elite messages. Public opinion shifts or settles in response to the relative intensity and stability of opposing flows of liberal and conservative communications. When elites are polarized, the public polarizes according to political awareness and values.

When elites unite on mainstream issues, the public's response is relatively nonideological and lopsided. School choice is progressively mainstreaming, slowly but surely moving from a polarized elite debate to one where the intensity and support is weighted in favor of school choice.

When an issue that used to be considered free-market fringe is embraced as a moral litmus test for politicians by liberal editorial boards, the issue-argument has been won. That's certainly not to say the policy war has been won, but an important battle toward realizing that goal has been.

The opposition's intensity and moral certitude is bleeding out one program at a time. School choice is no longer an abstract proposition; faces and lives are attached to the 24 private school-choice programs in 14 states and the District of Columbia. In the past four years, four education tax-credit programs have passed that serve at least low-income children.

School choice is popular and becoming more familiar to the public every year. An Education Next/Harvard PEPG survey found that even 53 percent of current and former public school employees support education tax credits and only 25 percent oppose them.

And support for choice, especially education tax credits, is becoming increasingly bipartisan. Florida's donation tax-credit program became law in 2001 with the vote of a single Democratic legislator. Last year, a third of statehouse Democrats, half the black caucus and the entire Hispanic caucus voted to expand that program.

New or expanded tax-credit initiatives were signed into law by Democratic governors in Arizona, Iowa and Pennsylvania in 2006. That same year, a Democrat-controlled legislature in Rhode Island passed a donation tax credit and a Democratic governor and legislature in Iowa expanded the tax-credit dollar cap by 50 percent in 2007.

Last year, six states moved a school choice bill through both chambers and five more passed a bill through one chamber. Georgia passed a universal donation tax credit program, and Louisiana passed both a voucher program and an education tax deduction.

School-choice opponents might have won the battle over vouchers in the District, but they are losing the larger war. They have inadvertently revealed what's truly at stake; not funding issues or public school ideology, but our promise to all children of a fair shot at success in life.

Choice opponents are on the wrong side of right and the wrong side of history.

Of the 1,700 students, starting in kindergarten, in this private-school voucher program, 90 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic.

First the House and then the Senate inserted into the $410-billion omnibus spending bill language to eliminate the $7,500 annual scholarships for these poor children after the next school year.

A key executioner in the Senate of the OSP was Sen. Dick Durbin, Illinois Democrat. I have written admiringly of Durbin's concern for human rights abroad. But what about education rights for minority children in the nation's capital?

Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute (where I am a senior fellow) supplied the answer when he wrote: "Because they saw it as a threat to their political power, Democrats in Washington appear willing to extinguish the dreams of a few thousand poor kids to protect their political base."

Teachers unions are a major part of that base. Among those demanding that Congress kill the voucher scholarship program was the largest teachers union, the National Education Association.

Two of the kids affected by the action, Sarah and James Parker, attend Washington's prestigious Sidwell Friends School. Their scholarships will end with the next school year. The classmates they'll be leaving will include Sasha and Malia Obama. The Obama children, of course, do not need voucher money to avoid Washington D.C.'s failing and sometimes dangerous public schools.

As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted, the congressional Democrats even refused to grandfather in the kids already in the voucher program, "so those children will be ripped away from their mentors and friends ... ." President Obama, he added, "has, in fact, been shamefully quiet about this."

Doesn't Obama at least have something to say publicly to those children and their parents when his own Secretary of Education Arne Duncan opposed the congressional shutdown of Opportunity Scholarships?

Said Duncan (New York Post, March 6): "I don't think it makes sense to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning. I think those kids need to stay in their school."

Duncan suggests that donors provide financial assistance through graduation to those kids stripped of their Opportunity Scholarships. Perhaps our "education president," from his continuing royalties from the sale of his books such as "The Audacity of Hope," might help out.

One of the recipients of the Opportunity Scholarships, teenager Carlos Battle (VoicesOfSchoolChoice.org) said that in a D.C. public school she'd "have to think more about protecting myself than about learning."

As for the Sidwell Friends School, its headmaster, Bruce Stewart, told the Wall Street Journal that the school has welcomed the OSP students. He said that when parents get more educational choices for their children, their kids and the whole community benefit.

Virginia Walden-Ford, executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice, offered an excellent suggestion for members of the White House press corps:

"I'd like to see a reporter stand up at one of those nationally televised press conferences and ask President Obama what he thinks about what his own party is doing to keep two innocent kids from attending the same school where he sends his?"

I wish Jay Leno had thought to ask Obama that question.

In a March 2 editorial, the Washington Post — not a conservative newspaper —summed up the Congressional Democrats' scholarship shutdown in these words: "It's about politics and the stranglehold the teachers unions have on the Democratic Party. Why else has so much time and effort gone into trying to kill off what, in the grand scheme of government spending, is a tiny program?"

But instituting national standards will not solve the problems facing our schools. Indeed, it would be like playing Russian roulette with our kids — with only one empty chamber.

What's driving this bandwagon?

The No Child Left Behind Act is a big part of it. NCLB requires schools to bring all students to math and reading "proficiency" by 2014, but leaves it to states to define what that means. This practically begs states to set weak standards in order to stay out of trouble, and has led to standards that vary markedly from state to state but are almost always very low.

Of course, NCLB isn't designed like this because it yields the best educational results. It's optimal politically. The law is structured to make federal politicians appear both tough on failing schools and dedicated to cherished local control.

But NCLB isn't the only problem. Many people simply don't trust the states, and reasonably so. As the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a longtime national standards supporter, has repeatedly documented, even before NCLB, state standards were all too often light and fluffy, not meaty and rigorous. In 2000, the Institute gave state standards an average grade of C minus, and concluded that only five states combined solid standards with strong accountability.

Like NCLB, politics explains this pitiful performance. As Fordham wrote, "Some people seem quite content to let it [establishing strong standards] take forever. ... That will allow all the standards setters, enforcers, testers, monitors and analysts to maintain full employment, and will enable elected officials to continue to claim that they and their states are fully engaged in standards—based reform."

In light of dismal state and federal track records, why should anyone expect national standards to miraculously avoid crippling politics and end up with anything better than what we've seen so far? No one should. Knowing that only a few states have occasionally gotten standards right, trying to nationalize them would be at best a high—risk game of Russian roulette.

Just think about how education politics works. Because their very livelihoods come from the public schools, the teachers, principals and bureaucrats who are to be held to performance standards exert outsized influence over them, and strongly resist being subjected to tough accountability. Meanwhile, politicians do whatever is easiest for them, trying to be all things to all people while keeping on the good sides of powerful interests such as teacher unions and administrator associations.

Political reality simply offers no support for national standards. Likewise, national standards supporters offer no convincing arguments for their proposal.

Randi Weingarten claims that "the countries that consistently outperform the United States on international assessments all have national standards." But most of the countries that do worse than we do also have national standards, making the correlation between national standards and academic success at best pretty weak.

How about the unreasonableness of states having "50 different goal posts," as was cited by Secretary Duncan?

Certainly no child should be legally condemned to a bad school, but the fundamental problem isn't that standards differ. Indeed, since all children are unique, differentiation at the individual level is critical to success. No, the fundamental problem is the "legally condemned" part. Unless their parents can afford private schools on top of taxes, children are forced to attend government schools that, by their very one—size—fits—all nature, stifle specialization and are powerfully inclined to low standards.

The last thing we need are government—driven national standards. We must not play Russian roulette with our kids. Indeed, we need to take the political revolver out of education completely. We need to let parents control education dollars, let autonomous schools freely set their own standards, and allow competition to continuously drive standards higher. We need universal school choice.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat, has asked D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to prepare for the return of voucher students to the city's broken public schools.

Sen. Ted Kennedy's office claims the senator opposed the voucher program from the start because it "takes funds from very needy public schools to send students to unaccountable private schools." (The House Budget Committee holds hearings today on the U.S. Education Department budget).

But just how needy are D.C. public schools? To find out, I added up all the K-12-related expenditures in the current D.C. budget, excluding preschool, higher-education and charter school items. The total comes to $1.29 billion. Divide that by the official enrollment count of 48,646 students, and it yields a total per-pupil spending figure of $26,555.

To put that number in context, it's about $2,000 more per student than the average tuition actually paid at Sidwell Friends, the prestigious school President Obama's daughters attend. And it is more than fourfold the $5,928 average tuition charged last year by the private schools serving voucher students.

What's more, the Opportunity Scholarship program does not take a dime away from D.C. public schools. On the contrary, the program brings with it an additional $13 million annually for the public schools - as part of a "sweetener" deal required to gain local and Democratic support at the time of its passage in 2004. Democrats apparently believe that a city with a $1.29 billion education honey pot requires an extra $13 million sweetener.

Needless to say, all that money does little good. The voucher students perform at least as well as public school students academically, and voucher parents are significantly happier with their chosen private schools than public school parents are with theirs, according to the Education Department's official report on the program released last year.

What, then, is the real reason congressional leadership wants to kick these kids out of the private schools they love, and back into public schools? How can they turn a deaf ear to the YouTube videos of voucher-receiving students beseeching them to preserve the program? There is only one plausible explanation: They see the program as a threat to the public school employee unions at the core of their party.

If allowed to continue, these Opportunity Scholarships will keep reminding voters that independent and parochial schools are more efficient and responsive to parents than public schooling. That might accelerate the spread of private school choice programs around the country. But while two-thirds of public school employees are union members, only about 7 percent of the private sector work force belongs to a union. Many in Congress have apparently done this math, and fear the effect of real private school choice on their political futures.

That analysis is dangerously shortsighted. The D.C. program is just one among dozens of private school choice programs operating around the country. These education tax credits and vouchers have been growing steadily, and there's no reason to expect that will stop. Congress is thus standing in front of a massive dike that is springing leaks. They have jammed their fingers into the hole that has arisen in D.C. for now. But the others will continue to widen and proliferate.

Other than pressure from the teachers' unions, supporting school choice might be easier for opposing legislators than they think. Voucher programs cannot be constitutionally enacted at the federal level outside the District of Columbia. So all congressional leadership needs to do is allow the D.C. program to continue and offer moral support to their party colleagues at the state level who have increasingly begun to support education tax credit programs. And they can rightly cite Democratic statesman Daniel Patrick Moynihan - who supported education tax credits as far back as the 1970s - as an early leader in the movement.

But if they continue with their current tactics, our union-inspired Congress will soon find itself on the wrong side of history as the demand for choice in education grows louder.

The bill on the table fails to reauthorize the program for another five-year term, as would be usual. Instead, it only funds the program for another year. Worse, it would grant a new veto power over the program to the DC City Council - so that the program could be killed down the line by either Congress or the City Council.

It's clear that congressional Democrats want this program dead, but are hoping someone else will pull the plug so that they can't be blamed for kicking 1,900 kids out of independent and parochial schools they've come to depend on. Chairman Obey (D-Wis.) has reportedly urged DC Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to prepare for the return of voucher students to DCPS.

Think of it as Myanmar on the Potomac: When Myanmar's ruling junta blocked desperately needed aid from reaching its cyclone-ravaged people last May, the world was outraged. How could a nation's leaders do that and still live with themselves? We might well ask our Democratic leaders in Washington the same question - for the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program provides a desperately needed escape from the city's disastrous public schools.

Just listen to the kids themselves. The Web site VoicesOfSchoolChoice.org offers a collection of videos in which voucher students and parents explain what they've gained from the program, and what they left behind in public schools. Be ready to feel a lump in your throat.

"My girls used to cry about using the restrooms [in public schools] 'cause they're so unclean," comments Ayesha McKinney, a single mom whose daughters have received Opportunity Scholarships. She adds: "There's no reason for kids to be in this unsafe, unclean environment."

Safety is a big issue with the voucher families - both for its own sake and for its impact on their children's education. Carlos Battle, a soft-spoken teen, notes: "If I was in the public school, I'd have to think more about protecting myself than about learning." He explains, "There wasn't a lot of actual learning going on in the public school. I wanted a challenge." If Congress doesn't reauthorize the program, he concludes, "that's basically taking a lot of the kids' dreams away."

Voucher parents are significantly happier with their schools than are public-school parents, but critics complain that the program had yet to raise overall academic achievement by a statistically significant margin - after just its second year of operation. Putting aside the fact that DC vouchers have significantly improved test scores for certain subgroups of students, this criticism ignores a crucial point: The voucher value is less than a quarter of total per-pupil spending in DC public schools.

The vouchers are worth an average of $6,000; last year, the District was spending $24,600 per student. If you could save 75 percent on a purchase, get the same or better quality of service, and know you'd be happier with the result, wouldn't you do it?

It seems congressional Democrats would not.

Of course, they have other things to think about besides what's best for kids - like getting re-elected. Public-school-employee unions see even tiny private-school-choice programs as a threat, and those unions are the backbone of the Democratic Party.

So, just as Myanmar's military dictators rebuffed international assistance because they saw it as a threat to their political power, Democrats in Washington appear willing to extinguish the dreams of a few thousand poor kids to protect their political base.

Democratic leaders no doubt hope that they can sweep all of this under the rug before the next election. But sooner or later, the public is going to stop believing the myth that more money for bureaucrats and fewer choices for parents are the solutions to America's educational woes.

When that time comes, a harsh scrutiny will be turned on all those who propped up the wretched school monopolies that are clipping so many children's wings. And whatever political harm Democrats might suffer from fully reauthorizing the DC voucher program now, it will pale compared the party's fate if it blindly rides the public-school status quo all the way to its inevitable collapse.

The granddaddy of battles on this issue is the 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial," when Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan feuded over a Tennessee law prohibiting any instruction in public institutions that even questioned "the story of Divine Creation." A few years ago, Dover, Pennsylvania was ground zero, as the town tore itself apart over a requirement that biology students hear a disclaimer that evolution is a theory, "not a fact." And there is now a dispute in Texas over public school science standards calling on students to evaluate the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories.

But how are the schools to blame for this wrenching warfare? Isn't it really all the fault of a relative handful of theocratic literalists who find the idea that human beings share common ancestry with apes, among other things, irreconcilable with the biblical account of creation?

Certainly they are a part of the conflict, but theirs is only the most uncompromising opinion. The Catholic church, for example, accepts Darwin's theory while asserting that the ultimate meaning of life comes through God. On the other end of the spectrum, the most ardent Darwinist wouldn't claim to know for certain how life sprang from lifelessness, leaving room for both evolution and a creator. And there is always the possibility that something even the vast majority of scientists are certain about will someday be proven incorrect.

The crux of the problem is that public schools can only espouse one view at a time and are unable to handle diversity. That has forced biblical literalists, committed atheists, and everyone in between to endlessly fight for control of the curriculum.

And this constant, divisive brawling might not even be the most damaging outcome of having to essentially designate "official" knowledge.

Given the imperfect state of human understanding, progress relies on people being freely able to debate, challenge and disprove one another. Public schooling, with its one-size-must-fit-all limitation, impedes that essential interplay.

Public schools, for one thing, are forbidden to teach anything that hints of religious instruction; even mentioning that God might have created life is often considered out of bounds. Moreover, because of the constantly looming threat of political domination, both creationists and evolutionists fear the slippery slope. They worry that if they allow any doubts to be aired about their beliefs, the total removal of those beliefs from the schools could follow.

That fear drove creationists in the "Scopes Monkey Trial," and it drives defenders of evolution today. As Eugenie C. Scott, president of the National Center for Science Education, has warned in Texas, "the phrase 'strengths and weaknesses' has been spread nationally as a slogan to bring creationism in through the back door."

Perhaps the most ironic outcome of all this warfare is that it often leaves all sides unhappy. Many religious citizens remain frustrated, with devotional religious instruction prohibited in public institutions. And Darwinists often get left in the cold as well; many teachers are too afraid of stirring up trouble to teach evolution. And such teaching of evolution as there has been over the past eighty years has born little fruit, with roughly half the population still disbelieving it. So, as with most wars, even when one side nominally "wins," both sides actually lose.

Of course, it is possible that one faction could accumulate enough political strength to crush its opposition and assume dictatorial power. But that would be an even greater loss than lowest-common-denominator curricula, eradicating the liberty that is the very foundation of free inquiry and a free society.

What we need to end disputes over human origins—and, for that matter, over sex education, phonics, multicultural history, and sundry other curricular tinderboxes—is to embrace liberty. We need school choice.

Education wars could end by putting funding in the hands of parents and letting them choose among autonomous schools. Because all would be free to select education compatible with their values, there'd be no need to fight. And if done through tax credits, so that taxpayers could select the schools or students to which their funds would flow, no one would be forced to support education with which they disagreed. The resulting marketplace of ideas would enhance freedom.

So on this, Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, let us stop fighting over the place of evolution in the public schools and resolve to have educational freedom. Let Darwin compete in a real marketplace of ideas. Everyone will be the wiser.

We are all in desperate need of practical policies that save money. And there just happens to be a reform that can save huge amounts from education, the biggest expense in state and local budgets: school choice.

A large-scale education tax credit can help get us through these lean times without tax increases, and it's the financial argument that will get a major choice program passed.

States are spending much more on k-12 education than even Medicaid, a program continually singled out as a budget-buster. At 25 percent of all state-derived expenditures, it's almost double Medicaid's 13 percent share. State spending on K-12 education dwarfs any other category and it's the biggest item on the local level too. And since education is such a big budget item, increased efficiency in education spending brings huge savings.

A recent fiscal analysis of the Cato's Institute's broad-based education tax credit program demonstrates that it can save states billions of dollars. New York could save more than $6 billion over the first five years alone, while Illinois could save more than $3 billion and South Carolina more than $400 million. And even the small programs already up and running had saved taxpayers more than $444 million by 2006.

It's no surprise that a recession and stock market in turmoil will make people more appreciative of the cost-saving benefits of a policy. But even without the economic turmoil, highlighting the financial benefits of school choice is the most effective way of increasing public support for an already popular policy.

Well before the recent financial crisis, I conducted a placebo-controlled experiment with more than 2,800 respondents - the same kind of methodology that's used in medical drug trials - that showed support for school choice increases the most when the economic benefits are emphasized. Indeed, the financial argument was the only one tested that increased support for education tax credits, which have proven the most popular and easily passed school choice policy in recent years.

School choice supporters tend to focus on the equity side of the argument for choice, emphasizing how poor and minority children are being left to fail in terrible schools. But making this argument is telling most people something that they already know; they're either already persuaded or, if they're not, telling them again won't make any difference.

Most people already accept that private schools are better than public ones on average, and that kids - particularly poor kids - will benefit from being able to choose a school. But the public assumes that the improvement will be marginal and that the cost of school choice will be huge. And why not? Name a policy in the last 50 years that was supposed to massively improve the lot of poor families that actually delivered on its promises and didn't cost taxpayers a bundle.

What people don't realize is that school choice saves huge amounts of money. They don't know that they're paying around $12,000 a year per student in California, $25,000 in Washington, D.C., or $20,000 in New York, $18,000 in New Jersey and $14,000 in Virginia. And the public certainly doesn't know that the median full tuition paid at U.S. private schools is just $4,000. So how in the world could they guess that school choice actually saves money?

That's why emphasizing the documented cost savings from school choice is so powerful: people are already convinced choice will help kids at least a little, so when you remove the public's huge fears about cost, they're much more likely to support school choice. The same misconceptions plague lawmakers, who think every program is another outlay and less revenue for them to play with. But school choice could be their savior in a time of growing budget shortfalls - and the state and local budget crises have just begun.

School choice provides a unique opportunity for politicians: significant savings and a popular reform that improves education. Sure, the teachers unions will scream. But the 14 states that already have private school choice programs prove the union bark can be worse than its bite. And the state of the economy will give lawmakers a powerful new argument for school choice, beyond the typical education reform and equity arguments that have done little to move the voting public.

States, school districts, and the average taxpayer simply can't afford not to have school choice.

The bad news doesn't end there. The economic slowdown is prompting many families who can no longer afford both taxes and private school tuition to move their children into public schools. Catholic elementary schools in the Diocese of Camden, for instance, have lost almost 1,000 students, about 10 percent of their enrollment from last year.

And those declining enrollment figures came before the worst of the recession hit.

The accelerating closure of private schools in urban areas will only add to the pressure. Public schools will suddenly need to spend more -- even as tax revenues drop. With this kind of budget problem, lawmakers need to take a look at an important benefit of programs that make it easier for families to choose private schools: School choice means huge savings for state and local governments.

New Jersey spends more than $18,500 a year on every student when you count all local school taxes and expenses like pension and health benefits. That figure doesn't even include huge sums spent on construction. A 1 percent drop in private school enrollment will put New Jersey governments on the hook for about $55 million a year; a 10 percent swing will require $550 million more in school spend ing. In contrast, the national me dian private school tuition is just over $4,000 and a little more than $5,000 when it's adjusted for New Jersey's higher income levels.

There is a way to avoid getting slammed by huge new demands for public school spending while saving money and improving education: A broad-based, moderate-size education tax credit would help families stay in private schools and save their children from burdening taxpayers with the public schools' (much greater) price tag. The credit would also help others make the switch to the private sector, easing the burden on taxpayers even more.

Education tax credits reduce the amount a taxpayer owes the government for each dollar he spends on his child's education or on scholarships for children who need them. That money comes straight off a person's tax liability, so it's a dollar-for-dollar benefit: You can send it to the government or use it on the kind of education you want to support. Tax credits for donations to scholarship organizations help support school choice for lower-income families, while personal-use credits help middle-class families send their children to good schools.

Democratic leaders in the state Senate and Assembly have proposed a donation tax credit plan for New Jersey. Businesses would get tax credits for donations to scholarship organizations that provide school choice for lower-income families. An economic study supporting the Urban Enterprise Zone Jobs Scholarship Act concludes that this tax credit for children in eight underperforming districts would save $72 million over the length of the five-year pilot. A re cent fiscal analysis of Cato's model tax credit legislation shows that New Jersey could save $5 billion to $10 billion over 10 years with that larger program based on the sav ings found for New York and Illinois.

Across the nation, many Democratic lawmakers have embraced education tax credits as a way to offset the persistent educational disadvantage facing low-income children. When Florida's donation tax credit program became law seven years ago, only one Democratic legislator voted for it. This year, a third of statehouse Democrats, half the black caucus and the entire Hispanic caucus voted to expand the program.

Arizona, Rhode Island and Iowa all passed education tax credit initiatives in 2006, and Pennsylvania, under Democrat Gov. Ed Rendell, expanded its program. The Arizona and Iowa bills became law under Democratic governors, and the Rhode Island business tax credit was born in a Democrat-controlled Legislature.

The momentum is still building. A government fully controlled by Democrats in Iowa -- governor and both legislative houses -- expanded the tax credit dollar cap by 50 percent in 2007. Just this year, Georgia passed a $50 million program with no family income cap on student eligibility.

A bipartisan group of New Jersey legislators, led by Raymond Lesniak (D-Union) and Tom Kean Jr. (R-Union), supports an education tax credit bill because it will improve education and save children from failing schools. Now they have billions more reasons to support it, and so do New Jersey's overburdened taxpayers.

Or do "liberals" generally oppose liberalization?

The Democrats have done well at all levels nationwide. Are the Democrats liberals? Do they favor liberalization?

If the Democrats are liberals and care about the poor, here are some things they should move to liberalize —

School choice. Giving parents the purchasing power to choose schools for their children improves education. Sweden has vouchers and it works well. Evidence increasingly shows that choice works and top-down government control doesn't.

Immigration. Let more in, including the low-skilled. Most Mexicans who come are much poorer than poor Americans, and they send part of their earnings to family members abroad. Their experience in the United States imparts liberal norms and they spread those norms abroad. Why should concern for the poor end at the border?

International trade. When two people engage in voluntary exchange, they both expect to gain, even when they live in different countries. When Americans trade with Brazilians or Indians, there are mutual gains. The trading partner abroad is often poorer than the American. As Paul Krugman and many before him have explained, free trade allows firms anywhere in the world to take advantage of scale economies, producing more for humanity while consuming fewer resources. Everyone wins. Economists overwhelmingly support freer trade.

Agricultural subsidies and protectionism. Prices of certain agricultural products are propped up by an array of governmental restrictions and cartel measures. Everyone pays the price at the grocery store, and the impact is regressive. Most economists support liberalization and the reduction of farm subsidies.

Drug prohibition. Most of the hundreds of thousands caged in prison cells on drug violations are poor. The illegal drug trade especially ravages poor neighborhoods. Those who suffer from impure, ill-labeled black-market drugs are poor. Most of those injured in black-market violence are poor. Most economists who publish judgments on the issue favor liberalization.

Occupational licensing. Licensing requirements restrict the supply and variety of services and raise prices. They also prevent poorer people from entering trades. Economists who write on the subject say that voluntary certifications, reputation, and other assurances work well, and they favor liberalization. Morris Kleiner of the University of Minnesota and Alan Krueger of Princeton University find that occupational licensing affects upwards of 25 percent of the workforce. Both have published judgments favoring liberalization.

The minimum wage. Unskilled workers have to compete against higher-skilled workers, machines, and anything else employers might do with their money. The minimum wage law strips unskilled workers of their primary means of competing: Lowering their price. Even when the minimum wage does not put them out of work, it affects the non-wage job attributes. It stands to reason that unskilled workers who get jobs at the minimum wage tend to face higher work demands, less flexibility, less on-the-job training, less non-wage benefits, and less recognition and consideration. In a depressed economy it is important that labor markets remain fluid and flexible.

The Food and Drug Administration control of pharmaceuticals. All drugs and devices are banned until individually permitted by the FDA. The costs, delays, and uncertainties suppress the development of drugs that would have saved lives. Economists who publish judgments on the matter resoundingly support liberalization.

Urban transit. State and local laws prevent market forms of transit — shuttles, jitneys, mini-buses, share-ride taxis, and smart carpools. Free-market forces have been largely forsaken to protect and serve governmentally run or planned systems that ill-serve the goals of mobility and efficiency. Economists who write on rail transit largely agree that most rail transit projects are ill conceived.

Rent control. Roughly 200 localities still have rent control. Economists who publish on the matter largely agree that it reduces the supply and the quality of rental-housing and generates conflicts. It increases prices of housing outside the rent-controlled sector. Very likely in the long-run it increases rents even in the controlled sector.

Do we think the Democrats will move to liberalize any of these?

What will they liberalize?

Why again do we call them "liberals"?

"Government can't do it all," Senator Obama has been reprimanding viewers in a 30-second education spot, a slightly surprising message given the audacious scope of what he says government can do. "As parents we need to turn off the TV, read to our kids, give them the thirst to learn."

While many parents could indeed stand to cut American Idol a bit short and break out the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, Obama is blaming the victims for the failures of government schooling.

Consider the gall: Public-schooling defenders insist that parents pay for public schools, largely on the grounds that parents can't handle education themselves. Then they spin right around to blame parents when the schooling is a dud!

Pointing this out is not to discount the research showing that the more parents are involved in their children's education, the better kids do. The problem is, most ideas for parental involvement do not include helping make decisions over what children will learn or who will teach them.

Bring the homeroom cupcakes? Sure! Run the bake sale? Be our guest! Demand a different curriculum? Um, not so fast. We have a school to run.

It isn't hard to figure out why parents don't get fired up about participating in their children's education when the roles accorded them are so trivial. But teachers and administrators don't want parents having any real say because, well, who wants the customers turning down the product when you can make them take it?

This explains why teachers unions, school administrator associations, and other defenders of the status quo hate school choice, especially programs that would let all parents choose any public or private school. Unfortunately, Obama stands with them. Yes, he voices support for charter schools, public schools that can operate more or less independently. But those schools exist largely at the will of the very districts with which they compete, and Obama is quick to add that "chronically underperforming" charters should be shuttered...without saying what, exactly, that means. It's like putting the fox in charge of the Department of Henhouse Security.

All of this is too bad, because in addition to showing that parental involvement is highly correlated with academic success, research shows that school choice—especially private school choice—increases parental involvement. Parents are more involved in schools they choose, and schools that must be chosen are quicker to involve parents.

Ah, but with choice, won't parents inevitably push schools to lower standards, inflate grades, and just generally kowtow to them?

Hardly. As we've learned from Washington, D.C.'s voucher program, once parents get choice, they start seeking out those things that experts say they aren't savvy enough to demand, like a rigorous curriculum. In other words, they look for quality, forcing schools to aim their sights up, not down.

Importantly, there's a critical proviso about the presidency when it comes to choice. Outside of Washington, the federal government has no constitutional authority to legislate in education. (Inside, conversely, a President Obama should do all he can to save the District's 1,900-student school choice program...but don't get your hopes up.) That means Obama shouldn't try to pass a Voucher for America, or something like that; the founders knew the feds couldn't possibly handle something as inherently local and, frankly, personal, as education. What he could do is use the bully pulpit to shame and browbeat state and local governments for providing an awful education product, and implore them to let parents choose the schools they want.

But therein lies the irony of Obama's education campaign, and what he's likely to do if he wins the presidency. While he gladly uses the bully pulpit to blame parents for our woes, he refuses to employ it to get them the power that they need.

Having apparently lost his open mind on the issue, Senator Obama has fallen back on the traditional political platform that equates higher spending with leadership and progress. In a major education speech in Dayton, Ohio, Obama opened with a grim assessment of the status quo: our high school students have some of the lowest math and science scores, and among the highest dropout rates, in the industrialized world. His solution? "Eisenhower doubled federal investment in education after the Soviets beat us to space. That's the kind of leadership we must show today." Obama is still more specific on this subject in his fact sheet on "21st century threats":

The trouble is, the National Defense Education Act was an expensive failure. Nationally, representative science scores from the time are hard to come by, but the mathematics performance of 11th graders fell in the eight years following passage of the law, according to "national norm" studies conducted by the College Board. Scores had still not returned to pre-NDEA levels a decade after that.

Graph One

This decline was not the result of changes in the percentage of students taking the test, and things did not improve in the ensuing decades. The mathematics performance of 17-year-olds has been stagnant since the early 1970s, while science scores have actually fallen slightly over the same period. That's according to the Long Term Trends portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which began around 1970.

Graph Two

Senator Obama clearly has lofty and laudable goals for American education - such as giving all children access to high-quality schools with challenging curricula, diminishing achievement gaps by race and socio-economic status, and "spurring innovation." But he advocates programs that have proven incapable of accomplishing these goals.

Barack Obama celebrates the federal Head Start early-education law and supports a somewhat softened version of No Child Left Behind. Both of these laws were created, in their initial forms, in 1965. Their main goal was to reduce academic achievement gaps between haves and have-nots. Since 1965, federal spending on these and other K-12 programs has totaled $1.85 trillion - nearly two thousand billion dollars. Has it done any good?

Achievement gaps between the kids of college graduates and the kids of high school dropouts haven't changed much. At the end of high school, reading and science gaps are about the same today as they were $2 trillion ago. The gap in math has shrunk by barely 1 percent. And while the black/white achievement gap at the end of high school shrank during the early- to mid-1980s, it began to increase slightly thereafter. Since the early 1990s, it has stagnated, despite a more than doubling in inflation-adjusted federal K-12 spending over that period.

It is tragic to see Senator Obama clinging to the failed approaches of the past, and ironic that his education platform so closely resembles that of President Bush. For, despite his protestations to the contrary, Obama's calls for massive spending increases on existing programs look like nothing so much as a third Bush term. Under President Clinton, annual federal spending on K-12 education rose by $9 billion. It rose by $19 billion under Bush.

Both McCain and Obama have suggested they would preserve President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind Law with a few nips and tucks. But Obama has actually poked fun at those who would scrap the law, and faulted McCain for not promising to spend even more on it.

NCLB's supporters like to note that some scores for fourth and eighth graders have risen slightly on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in recent years. What they and the media fail to mention is that U.S. performance on international tests has stagnated or fallen in mathematics, science and reading over the same period. We've dropped to 18th place in reading, 21st in science, and 25th in math.

Though the performance of federal education programs has been deeply disappointing, there is copious evidence available on what actually does work. I recently published a global review of the research comparing market-like private-school systems to public-school monopolies. The overwhelming majority of scientific studies favors education markets on everything from student achievement and school efficiency to parental satisfaction and the physical condition of school buildings. Senator Obama, you once expressed openness to empirical evidence on this issue. An open mind, like a vote, is a terrible thing to lose.

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New York state faces a budget hole as high as $2.5 billion this year, with even bigger shortfalls in the years ahead - and local governments are strapped, too.

Meanwhile, the economic slowdown will prompt many families who can no longer afford both taxes and private-school tuition to move the kids into public schools - adding to the pressure. The schools will need to spend more - even as tax revenues drop.

Because so many New York kids now attend private schools, governments face a potentially massive rise in costs from a spike in public-school enrollments.

Public schools in Manhattan have already reported a surge in interest from private-school families hit hard by the financial meltdown. The trend is likely to move upstate as the economy dips into recession.

At current levels of per-pupil spending, just a 1 percent drop in private-school enrollment will put New York governments on the hook for about $100 million a year. A 10 percent swing means about $1 billion more in school spending.

A look at the numbers explains why: New York has one of the largest private-school populations in the country, with almost 16 percent of all K-12 students opting out of government institutions. And when all costs are counted, the state's public schools spend a whopping $20,000 per pupil.

Thankfully, there's a way to avoid getting slammed by huge new demands for public-school spending while saving even more money and improving education: A broad-based, moderate-sized education tax credit would help families stay in private schools, preventing their children from burdening taxpayers with the public school's (much greater) price tag. The credit would also help others make the switch to the private sector, easing the burden on taxpayers even more.

Education tax credits reduce the amount a taxpayer owes the government for each dollar he spends on his own child's education or on scholarships for children who need them. That money comes straight off a person's tax liability, so it's a dollar-for-dollar benefit: You can either pay it to the government or use it on the kind of education you want to support. Tax credits for donations to scholarship organizations help support school choice for lower-income families, while personal-use credits help middle-class families send their own children to a good school.

A recent Cato Institute analysis of model tax-credit legislation shows that New York stands to save more than $15 billion in the first 10 years. Fifteen years into the program, Empire State taxpayers would save an estimated $4.8 billion every year.

With such savings from a reform that injects proven parental choice and competition into education, it's no surprise that tax credits are growing in popularity with US lawmakers of all parties.

When Florida's donation tax-credit program became law seven years ago, only one Democratic legislator voted for it. This year, a third of statehouse Democrats, half the black caucus and the entire Hispanic caucus voted to expand that program.

Arizona, Rhode Island and Iowa all passed education tax-credit initiatives in 2006, and Pennsylvania expanded its existing program. The Arizona, Iowa and Pennsylvania bills became law under Democratic governors, and the Rhode Island business-tax credit was born in a Democrat-controlled Legislature.

The momentum is still building. A government fully controlled by Democrats in Iowa - governor and both legislative houses - actually expanded the tax-credit dollar cap by 50 percent in 2007. Just this year, Georgia passed a $50 million program with no family-income cap on student eligibility.

Gov. Paterson supports education tax credits because he knows school choice improves education and saves children from failing schools. Now he has billions more reasons to support it.

The Legislature should join with Paterson to help improve education and the state's balance sheet. Education tax credits can make these trying financial times a whole lot easier for everyone.