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

• Author: Whitmire, Richard

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

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

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

The good work of Charlotte Parker proves the teachers unions right when they say there are good public schools out there. And the equally...