ant to see the dilemma school vouchers present for the Democratic establishment? Ask Al Gore why, given the growing minority-community support for the idea, he's against letting parents use public dollars for private schools.
''If the choice were between a continued gradualism [in school improvement] and radical departures like vouchers, then I might throw my hand in with them, just out of a feeling that we can't lose another generation and so throw the kitchen sink at it,'' the vice president says.
So would Gore then stipulate that if public education hasn't made marked improvements in, say, five years - more than another high school generation - he would support vouchers?
''I am not going to give up on public schools or give you a date ... because I am not going to surrender,'' Gore replies.
In other words, lip service aside, Gore's hypothetical is a demand without a deadline, a someday that will likely never come.
Still, his reply demonstrates the political crosscurrents on vouchers, a policy proposal rapidly making the transition from conservative nostrum to mainstream acceptability.
The idea is simple. Not only do vouchers empower parents and pupils, but by injecting competition into the system, they can do more to stimulate improvement in the public schools than any top-down government edict has done so far.
Because of the conservative origin of the idea - economist Milton Friedman first offered it in the 1950s as a way to apply market principles to education - the political left has traditionally treated the proposal as though it were radioactive.
Undergirding Democratic establishment opposition is the fact that vouchers are anathema to the teachers unions; the two largest - the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers - endorsed Gore last week. And vouchers represent one more victory for privatization, at the cost of a public institution.
But at the same time, the idea is increasingly popular with black and Latino voters, whose children are disproportionately trapped in underperforming urban schools.
Vouchers' appeal among minority voters is one reason vouchers have finally arrived on the public agenda as a realistic policy proposal. And arrive they have.
Under Governor Jeb Bush, Florida this year enacted a voucher plan for pupils in its worst schools. Milwaukee has had a voucher plan since 1990 for low-income students, and has included religious schools since 1995; Ohio passed a voucher program for Cleveland in 1995; in 1998, Congress passed - and President Clinton vetoed - vouchers for the District of Columbia. In New Mexico, Governor Gary Johnson, a Republican, has made enacting a voucher program such a priority he's attracted international attention.
''Light bulbs are going off,'' declares Johnson. ''People are talking about this issue everywhere.''
More impetus has come from the private sector. Since 1992, 69 private programs have sprung up across the country, providing $275 million in voucher scholarships for more than 100,000 schoolchildren.
But the market test of any idea is a political campaign, and it's there one can best see the growing appeal.
The most aggressive proposal has come from John McCain, the Arizona senator running for the GOP presidential nomination, who has called for a three-year, $5.4 billion demonstration project to provide 1 million vouchers for economically disadvantaged children.
''It is obviously something that has gained popularity and support within the inner city,'' said McCain. ''The indications are that they work, and that's why I'm saying we ought to have a test voucher program.''
Among McCain's Republican rivals, Texas Governor George W. Bush last month said he favored letting disadvantaged students in poorly performing schools use federal Title 1 money for private-school tuition. Last week, he proposed allowing states to use as much as $2 billion in federal block grants for voucher programs and for establishing tax-free accounts that could be used for private-school tuition.
Publisher Steve Forbes is a strong advocate of vouchers, and former Cabinet secretary Elizabeth Dole, like Bush, wants to give states the option of using federal dollars for such programs.
But vouchers aren't just for Republicans anymore. Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator challenging Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination, has supported vouchers in the past as a way to give poor children an alternative to particularly dangerous, drug-ridden schools.
And despite news reports that he's backed off that support, Bradley, in a recent Globe interview, said he hadn't abandoned the idea. The key issue for Bradley is whether the resulting competition improves the public schools; to that end, he's watching the programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland closely.
''I am not going to eliminate any possible thing that I can do to improve the public schools,'' says Bradley, who says he would emulate Franklin D. Roosevelt's model of selective policy experimentation. ''When I am president, I am going to try this, I am going to try that, but we are going to improve urban public schools,'' Bradley said.
Bradley's position reflects a growing mainstream interest. In July, The Atlantic Monthly argued that the access, equity, and individual choice that vouchers offer make them an important idea for progressives. And in the Oct. 4 New Republic, Paul Peterson, a government professor at Harvard, makes a liberal case for vouchers, saying that fears schools would ''cherry pick'' the best students simply haven't been borne out in the much-watched private voucher program offered to low-income children in San Antonio's Edgewood School District.
Nor have other dire predictions of disaster been born out.
If vouchers haven't proved a cure-all, most reviews of the Milwaukee and Cleveland programs have recorded widespread parental satisfaction. And of the five big studies done so far of those programs, ''all but one finds significant positive effects on academic performance,'' says Jay Greene, an assistant professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, who has worked on several of those evaluations.
As for the effect on the public schools - Bradley's test - there's growing evidence that voucher competition in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and even in Florida's incipient program has pushed the public schools to do better.
McCain says he has seen the same result from the competition charter schools have brought to Arizona.
So why, among the serious candidates, is Gore the lone holdout on vouchers?
In his visit to the Globe last week, Gore cited these concerns: Vouchers would drain money from the public schools; private schools lack sufficient capacity to replace the public schools; private academies wouldn't take poor children; vouchers would pay for ''only a fraction'' of tuition and would exclude those with special needs or disabilities.
The last is a real (though hardly insuperable) concern. But voucher supporters answer each of the others with convincing counterarguments. To wit: The threat of losing public dollars is essential to creating competition; the aim isn't to replace public schools but to foster improvement through competition, though private-school capacity would increase as demand grew.
And far from excluding low-income students, the Cleveland and Milwaukee programs, as well as the Bush and McCain proposals, target that very population. Finally, vouchers would be inadequate only if one hopes to attend elite boarding schools like Groton or Middlesex or St. Albans.
''If you look at the figures published by the federal government itself, on average, private school costs half as much as public school per year,'' says Andrew Coulson, author of ''Market Education.'' For 1996, for example, the average private school tuition was $3,116, compared with an average per pupil cost of $6,653 in the public schools.
The real issue is the one Steve Wollmer, spokesman for the National Education Association, identifies: Any realistic voucher program must rely heavily on religious schools.
''If you take religious schools out of the equation, we don't even have the discussion,'' says Wollmer, whose organization opposes vouchers. ''So what this is really about is whether we are going to use public dollars to fund religious schools.''
That's exactly right: It's the religious schools that make a voucher system work. So should public dollars go for religious schools? On the constitutional question, there's some expectation the US Supreme Court may take up vouchers this term.
But proponents point to powerful policy parallels.
''As long as resources are put in the hands of parents rather than schools directly, I don't see any difference between taking a voucher to a private high school and taking a Pell Grant to Boston College,'' says Jim Peyser, chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education. (That said, the stricter Massachusetts state Constitution would clearly have to be changed to allow use of state dollars for such a program.) Perhaps the best way to think about the question may be to return to Al Gore's rhetorical choice. It's been 16 years since the Reagan administration's blue-ribbon commission issued its famous report, ''A Nation at Risk,'' declaring that America faced ''a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people.''
Since then, only an optimist would say the nation's schools have made even the gradual progress Gore says could finally drive him to vouchers. As for urban schools, well, the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that, at best, only 40 percent of urban students had reached a basic level of achievement in reading, math, and science.
It is against such a reality that voters have to judge Gore's claim that the nation is poised for ''dramatic'' school improvement - the kind that would make vouchers unnecessary.
