From the Editorial Page

Been following the President’s education bill? Fugeddaboudit. Once the White House and Congressional Republicans agreed that “leaving no child behind” would take a back seat to getting Democratic names on an education bill, even the mild school-choice provisions in the original package had to be sacrificed on the Beltway altar of “bi-partisanship.” The long and short of it is that if we’re to get any real reform any time soon, the political leadership will have to come from the states.

The good news is that Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery has just stepped into the breach. While national headlines focus on just how many more tax dollars it takes to get Teddy Kennedy to back an education bill George W. Bush could sign, Mrs. Montgomery has quietly upped the ante: Last Wednesday she petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to rule-once and for all-on the constitutionality of vouchers.

Unlike Congress, you see, back in Ohio they have a school district they have to run. And with a divided Sixth Circuit Court having found Cleveland’s voucher program a violation of the Constitution’s establishment clause the future of all such efforts remains in what Mrs. Montgomery’s petition rightly calls a state of “paralyzing judicial con- fusion.” It is worth recalling here that when in 1995 Ohio launched its now famous experiment, Cleveland’s public school system was bankrupt -literally, morally, metaphorically. Rather than ask the victims of that system to wait for an improvement that might never come-not, at least, in time for their children-Cleveland decided that what those who suffered most needed was an escape hatch.

That escape hatch was a scholar- ship providing the poorest of the poor with up to $2,400 in a voucher that can be applied to any school. The realities of the government’s education monopoly being what they are, for most Cleve- land moms and dads that meant the only real alternative was a Catholic school. Apparently they were grateful to have it. Even when a federal district judge ruled the program unconstitutional just two days before the start of the 1999 school year, the children selected for scholarships stayed in their new schools. And there they remain,’ some 4,000 of them, as the program that rescued them remains suspended in legal limbo, with two state high courts finding voucher programs Constitutional and the Sixth Circuit Court finding just the opposite.

That is what’s now before the Supreme Court: Real kids benefiting from real schools providing a real solution to a real crisis. The implications, of course, extend far beyond Cleve- land. Just two months ago, the National Assessment of Education Progress found that about a third of American fourth, graders can’t read. For African-American and Hispanic kids the numbers are grimmer still: 63% and 58%, respectively., If IBM or Microsoft or General Motors ran a business with that kind of disparate impact; the trial lawyers would hit the jackpot.

The point is that it’s not quite true that our public school system doesn’t work. In fact it works exceptionally well, once you understand that it’s purpose is not to educate but to preserve and protect a monopoly run for the benefit of teachers unions who happen also to constitute the backbone of the national Democratic Party. As the NAEP report card makes all too clear; this particular monopoly is, moreover, one built on the backs (and the futures) of America’s poorest minorities and children. It’s a wonder the teachers unions and their political allies get away with it.

If Betty Montgomery has her way, they won’t. The Supreme Court cannot fix America’s rotten schools. But it’s time it cut loose the people who can.