Education tops the list of Americans' concerns. But there's no agreement on what to do about it. The biggest emerging battle is between people who advocate school choice and those who want more money for schools. George W. Bush wants to give vouchers to poor kids in failing schools so they, and their parents, can shop for a better education.

But Al Gore says no way. He would prefer to spend $115 billion more on schools over the next 10 years, by contrast with the $13.6 billion over five years that Mr. Bush proposes. Joe Lieberman, who has sponsored legislation calling for experiments with vouchers for private schools, is now mute on the subject. Meanwhile, voucher plans in Cleveland and Florida are in the courts, and initiatives to authorize statewide voucher schemes will be on ballots this fall in California and Michigan.

Vouchers Work

The standoff between vouchers and money is predictable. It is also regrettable, because it prevents consideration of a most promising way to improve school performance—giving kids "progressive" vouchers that are inversely related to the size of their family's income.

Evidence mounts that vouchers do work for kids who use them. A new study of students in New York, Washington and Dayton, Ohio—conducted by researchers at Harvard, Georgetown and the University of Wisconsin—found that after two years, the average performance of black students who switched to private schools was 6% higher than that of students who stayed behind in public schools.

So why not simply "voucherize" all education funding and let students and their parents select where they can get the best education? After all, that's what wealthy and upper-middle-class families do by choosing pricey homes in upscale towns with excellent public schools (in which case the "voucher" comes with the home), or by sending their kids to private schools. Voucher proponents, including a growing number of black parents, argue that poor kids should have the same advantage.

The biggest drawback to vouchers is that kids who are most troublesome, or whose parents couldn't care less or are overwhelmed with other problems, would almost certainly end up bunched together in the worst schools. Such schools would become even worse than they were before. After all, the increasing concentration of poor kids in America's poor schools has already compounded the problems these kids and those schools must deal with. Assuming that the kids who leave these schools take public money with them, the worst schools would end up with fewer resources per difficult child.

The new study also confirms the importance of school environment. The parents of voucher recipients noted the differences between their children's private schools and their former public schools, pointing out that there was less fighting, less destruction of property, and less racial conflict in the private schools than in the public schools their kids left behind.

Why is behavior better in private schools? For one thing, private schools enforce discipline in ways that public schools cannot. In particular, private schools can expel a child who seriously misbehaves. About 20% of the students in the study who were selected to attend private schools never completed the two years. It seems a fair guess that at least some of them were sent packing. But public schools must, by law, provide a public education to all.

The students drawn to private schools are also likely to be better behaved than those who remain in public schools. In the study I cite, most of the students already attending the private schools were from families who cared enough about their children to seek a good education for them, and who earned enough to afford one. By contrast, many inner-city public schools are comprised of students whose families are either unable to pay attention to their futures, or very poor, or both.