President Bush’s visit to Harlem — scheduled to take place at mid-day today — is no small triumph for the charter school movement that is at such an important juncture in New York. And it is a particular triumph for Deborah Kenny, the visionary founder of Harlem Village Academy, the charter school the president will visit today. She calls education not only “an essential human right” but the “ultimate civil right,” and her work has helped get across in this union town the idea that the movement to establish these kinds of schools and give parents greater choices in the education of their children is part of the same civil rights movement that inspired this country during the second half of the 20th century.

To gain a flavor of this, one can visit the Web site villageacademies.org, which lists, among much other illuminating reading, what it calls the “key educational program elements” of the school. They include a “rich liberal arts curriculum based on rigorous standards of excellence,” a longer school day, a “collegebound school culture,” tutoring, Saturday school and study hall for students who need extra help, a “culture and system of accountability, a “clear, strict code of conduct,” and school uniforms. Its site asserts that it makes “a deliberate effort to reach out and recruit New York’s neediest and lowest-performing children.” All are minority pupils, 88% are at or near poverty, and 12% are special education students. Students are accepted through an open lottery.

The results it posts on its Website are extraordinary. Its 2005 pass rate in English language arts of 71% towers over the 39% of the union-operated monopoly system in Harlem’s District 5 and the 55% for New York City. There were similar disparities in the 2005 New York City mathematics test (33% passing in District 5, 50% in the city, and 74% at Harlem Village Academy). The percents passing in seventh-grade that year were 26%, 55%, and 61% respectively. It says all of its students who scored at level one advanced to level two or three, its homework completion rate is 96.5%, and its average student attendance is 96% (compared to a reported attendance rate in the public schools of a bit below 90%).

Not everyone reckons that the triumph in Harlem translates into a triumph for Mr. Bush. Skeptics of his education program argue that in respect of the president’s No Child Left Behind program, the president is on a precipice, with hearings underway in the Congress in which reauthorization of the president’s program is at risk. But all the greater the importance of the charter school movement that Mr. Bush will be saluting in Harlem, a point underscored by the fact that both Congressman Rangel and Chancellor Klein will be with Mr. Bush today. The right way to sort all this out is through public policies maximizing parental choice, meaning vouchers. That is not to take anything away from the signal Mr. Bush is sending in Harlem, for, as Ms. Kenny declares on the Village Academy Web site, “the revolution is happening here.”