"Look at how many children are being lost while reforms are being put in place," Crenshaw district resident Johnnie Morgan, whose son and daughter attended Garvey, said of efforts to improve Los Angeles' public schools. "We can't afford [to wait]. Never could--and not now, especially in this technological age."

The impatience of parents like Morgan and the debate over vouchers in the presidential campaign are likely to grow even more with the release of a study last week showing that test scores improved among African American children who used vouchers to switch to private schools. Children from other ethnic groups showed no similar improvement.

The study, led by Harvard professor Paul Peterson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, found that black students enrolled in privately funded experimental voucher programs in New York, Washington and Dayton, Ohio, improved an average of 6.3 points in percentile rankings in test scores in math and reading relative to a control group that remained in public schools.

In Los Angeles, small private schools like Garvey, West Angeles and Price, run largely by churches, have several advantages over public schools--small classes and involved parents among them.

Their students are screened and are often required to take entrance exams. More important, these schools can expel problem students, sending them back to public school.

As important as those advantages are, some parents of private school students say, they do not fully explain the widening gap in student performance between predominantly black public and private schools.

Some parents are left wondering whether public schools have become too large--too hamstrung by bureaucracy—to work for too many students.

"In public school, your children just seem to get lost in the shuffle," said Althea Weeks of Lynwood, whose son Brannon was one of three Garvey students to go directly to community college in 1998 after completing seventh grade.

Weeks said she knows other parents who would also send their children to private schools--if they could afford to.

"I have friends who have investigated Garvey," Weeks said. "They think Garvey is too good to be true, but most cannot make it with their financial situation."

Garvey's tuition of $6,000 a year is a formidable economic barrier to many parents. That hard economic reality, Weeks said, convinced her and her late husband of the need for some kind of voucher system.

"With vouchers, more kids would have been able to get a good opportunity," she said, "an opportunity they are not getting in public school."

For parents like Marketta Martin of Compton, the time has long since passed when public schools should be the only option for their children.

"I pay taxes and I should be able to send my child to any school I want to," Martin said. "I should have that money. With vouchers, my choice could be a public or private school."

Martin, whose daughter attends Compton's Dominguez High School, said that if vouchers were available in Compton, "everybody would be out of public schools. One teacher told me her ninth-graders read at the third-grade level. 'How can I teach them writing?' she asked."

Garvey parent Morgan echoes her sentiments. "I think the public system is becoming less and less effective for African American students in particular," he said. "Unless you have the means or are willing to sacrifice as my wife and I have done, there is no choice."

Vouchers would allow more students to enroll at Garvey, "and with more funds we would be able to pay teachers more," said Garvey's Executive Director Vanessa Beverly. "But that has never been a problem for teachers committed to teaching black children. They're not in it for the money."

Garvey, a secular campus whose teachers earn between $1,400 and $1,600 a month, is staunchly Afrocentric, and it gets impressive performances from students even though none of its teachers have degrees or teaching credentials.

"We know all black children can learn," Beverly said. "You want to do everything you can to make these students successful. You already have that natural love for them. But you are not only loving, guiding and protecting them; you also have to nurture the students."

With teachers who love and nurture "and expect the performance, that's where you get the performance," she said.

High Expectations Crucial to Success

High expectations--and an effort to build self-esteem--are crucial to the success of such schools. In class after class, teachers deliver a powerful message: You are the best, and we know you'll learn like the best.

This message, private school advocates say, is not delivered so forcefully in the public schools. In the view of these advocates, public schools have a long history of routinely steering black students into non-college prep curricula or worse, shuttling them off to special education classes.

Such intangibles are more important than brick and mortar, staffers and administrators at Garvey say.

The attitude is similar at the West Angeles Christian Academy, where all of the teachers have degrees and four of 11 have credentials. There, Principal Deloris Armstrong also looks for what she calls "a special kind of teacher."