Trading spaces.

• Author: Whitmire, Richard

In late January, President Bush signed a giant spending bill containing one tiny but explosive provision: a five year, $14-million program to provide private-school vouchers to the children of the District of Columbia. With that, Bush launched an aggressive new phase of the decade-long battle over the voucher issue. Previous small experiments in places like Milwaukee and New York have relied on private or state funds. The D.C. program, set to begin in the fall, puts the federal government directly into the voucher-funding game. And while vouchers may be too controversial with swing voters for Bush to openly talk about them in this year's presidential race, the fact that his administration negotiated so hard for the D.C. program suggests that we're likely to see a big push for vouchers in any second Bush term.

Vouchers are one of those subjects for which both sides marshal compelling, if ultimately unsatisfying, arguments. Their opponents argue that to date, studies have not found much evidence that existing voucher programs have yielded improved achievement; that, unlike the public education system, private schools aren't required to test all their students, as public schools now are, and hence aren't accountable for results; and that whatever extra money is available ought to go first to improve existing public schools. Voucher proponents counter that there's no evidence that vouchers do any harm, some indications that they improve minority student performance, and that after 20 years of only slightly successful attempts to reform urban schools, it simply is not fair to keep poor kids waiting around in visibly failing schools for reforms to kick in.

What's needed is a way to cut through this Gordian knot--with a voucher program that provides poor kids with real choice, has a demonstrated record of success and avoids the pitfalls that make liberals skeptical. As it happens, such a program has been underway in Missouri for years.

Beginning in 1983, as the result of a court desegregation order, inner-city St. Louis schoolchildren were allowed to cross city-suburban boundaries to fill empty seats in wealthier suburban school districts, the state paying a fee for each such child to the suburban schools that accept them. This program, called the St. Louis Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corp., was more politically popular than most similar busing programs around the country, and the state legislature voted to keep it going in 1999, when the...