America needs a well-educated citizenry. Along with good character and discipline, a quality education is required to succeed in today’s economy.

Most suburban schools, like those in Bozeman, perform well. Bozeman High boasts SAT scores well above the national average, regularly produces National Merit Scholars, and sends graduates to top-flight colleges. I occasionally guest lecture to junior- and senior-level economics classes and find most of the students engaged, alert, and well informed.

However, low-income minority families in urban areas aren’t as fortunate. Unable to afford a home in the suburbs with better schools, their children are trapped in poorly performing inner-city schools. This has dire consequences for American society. In 2003 only 51 percent of black students graduated from high school. The ramifications are devastating: 28 percent of the young black men who failed to graduate are in jail.

Inflation-adjusted education spending has doubled in the past 30 years. Yet test results show a widening achievement gap between black students and whites and Asians. This disgrace merits hard reform.

America awaits the educational analog to Silent Spring or the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. Regarding the latter, UC Santa Barbara sociologist Harvey Molotch explored how the residents of one of America’s most well educated and affluent communities mobilized their contacts with social and political elites to bring the spill to national prominence.

Ramparts, a hard left magazine, published his piece, “Oil in Santa Barbara and Power in America.” Molotch wrote: “[M]ore than oil leaked from Union Oil’s Platform A in the Santa Barbara channel -- a bit of truth about power in America spilled out along with it....” Such events, he wrote, are “an important instrument for learning about the lives of the powerful and the features of [their] social system....”

Likewise, Hurricane Katrina unmasked the failure of those controlling the government schools in New Orleans; the cover of their disgrace was blown away. By one measure, the English test scores of 96 percent of Orleans Parish high school students were unacceptable, as were 94 percent of math test scores.

The fiscal situation is also horrible. There are so many fraud investigations, the FBI has an office in the New Orleans school-district headquarters. One agent told the New Orleans Times Picayune, “I’m a CPA doing this [for] 20 years. This is the absolute worst I’ve ever seen.”

Is a lack of money to blame for poor performance? New Orleans spends $7,296 per student, the same as Montana. Assuming a class of 25 children, this is over $182,000 per classroom. If the teacher makes $40,000 a year, that accounts for a bit more than 20 percent. Where does the rest of the money go?

Urban public schools’ abysmal performance harms poor blacks the most. Instead of pleasing consumers, promoting the public interest, or helping the disadvantaged, New Orleans schools are administered to benefit politically powerful special-interest groups, i.e., the National Education Association and the politicians they rent.

Why do politicians sacrifice our least fortunate children to the monopoly of failing schools? Can we condone this hypocritical and venal behavior? Should we consider those who reject proven alternatives to governmental monopolies as exploiters of children?

It’s been 50 years since Milton Friedman first proposed using school vouchers to give parents greater control over their children’s education. Regarding New Orleans he recently wrote: “New Orleans schools were failing for the same reason that schools are failing in other large cities, because the schools are owned and operated by the government.... This top-down organization works no better in the U.S. than it did in the Soviet Union or East Germany.”

Harvard researcher Caroline Hoxby has found that, wherever public schools face serious competition for students and educational dollars, they improve. This is because school choice gives families (especially poor ones) the leverage they’ll never have in the political arena. Instead of satisfying politicians and teachers unions, schools now compete to satisfy parents.

Here’s a modest, progressive suggestion for educational reform: give vouchers equal to 50 percent of governmental funding to the parents. This will provide the incentives to create an educational environment that rewards good teaching, encourages parental involvement, rewards positive innovation, and gives our most disadvantaged hope for the future.