THE FAILURE of many public school systems around the country to offer any semblance of an education to millions of children is not a matter of serious dispute. Wealthy and middle-class people have an out: private schools or a move to a jurisdiction with better public schools. The poor often have no option. And while policymakers debate -- and bureaucracies often obstruct -- efforts at meaningful school reform that will take years to produce results even if all goes well, one generation after another is lost to failing schools. This miserable backdrop does not mean that anything goes in sending public money to parochial schools. It does counsel against adopting so rigid a view of church-state separation that an entire realm of potentially valuable school reform experiments -- those involving vouchers -- would become unavailable to legislatures. In affirming yesterday the constitutionality of Ohio's use of vouchers in Cleveland -- one of the country's most dramatically failed school systems -- the Supreme Court's conservative majority rightly created wiggle room for states, localities and potentially even Congress to try carefully designed voucher programs. The case split the court along ideological lines, with the court's more liberal justices all but declaring this voucher program to signify the end of church-state separation. We don't belittle the dangers. But the dangers of vouchers are hypothetical ones at this stage. The crisis in education is real. And the court should not be insisting that the only lawful policies are the ones that have already failed.
In fact, the court's opinion is less of a shift than the dissenting justices contend. There have long been governmental subsidies that support sectarian organizations, including schools. And the Cleveland program does not give money directly to religious schools. The vouchers go to parents, who can use them at any participating private school. While these are overwhelmingly sectarian, that's partly because certain participating secular schools opted to become charter schools and thus stopped being counted. When one considers the full range of school choices available to parents, it becomes implausible to argue that anyone is being forced into religious education. Parents in Cleveland who wish to yank their children from local public schools have charter schools, magnet schools and religious and secular private schools to choose from. Under these circumstances, the program hardly seems an establishment of religion forbidden by the First Amendment.

The potential value of offering wide latitude for experimentation is now on display within the D.C. public school system, where Moten Elementary School saw a dramatic increase in test scores over the past year. Moten, which is in Anacostia, introduced same-sex classrooms and cut its lunch hour. The percentage of its students scoring at least "proficient" on the Stanford 9 reading and math tests nearly doubled in a single year. Such results need to be tested over time before definitive lessons are drawn. But that's the point: It's essential to try new approaches, from how individual public schools should be run to whether private school options should be available, and then to measure the results. Vouchers may offer answers for some children. The Constitution should not be read to forbid policymakers from finding out. In fact, our quarrel with the Cleveland program would be that the vouchers are too small. Imagine how much competition might be generated, and with what respect poor parents might be treated, if they were given an $ 8,000 voucher for each child, and public schools really had to prove they were worth what society now spends on them.