while carefully sending their children to private ones (which Mr. Gore and George W. Bush both attended). Why not give less-lucky students a break? Tax-financed vouchers to help pay for private schools deserve to be tried, not necessarily in all districts, but where public schools have shown themselves resistant to improvement.

A new study gives more ammunition to voucher supporters. Researchers from Georgetown, Harvard and the University of Wisconsin found that African-American students in Washington, D.C., New York City and Dayton who shifted to private schools with the help of vouchers scored an average of more than six percentile points higher on standardised math and reading tests than those who stayed in public schools. Oddly, the Hispanic and white children in the study showed no statistically significant change in scores when sent to private institutions. Perhaps the black students attended worse public schools and therefore benefited most from private ones.

The findings suggest that the national experiment with vouchers should be widened. Governor Bush supports vouchers for poor families to pay for private-school tuition. The vice president doesn't, warning that vouchers drain needed resources from public schools (wherein work his enthusiastic backers in the teachers unions).

Well, yes, public education must be strengthened. But in some places, the public schools have shown so little capacity for improvement -- have been so disorderly, violent, politicised, bureaucratised and/or hamstrung by rigid labour agreements -- that only vouchers can inject the competition needed to jar them into improvement while providing the less fortunate with the chance that wealthy students have always had.

Indeed, giving some public schools more money is a waste. Look at the District of Columbia's astronomically expensive, corrupt, violent and ineffective school system: It should be shut and an entirely different arrangement replace it. Places like the District desperately need the social justice provided by school choice, and the institutional competition that prods all schools to get better. -- The Providence, Rhode Island Journal-Bulletin