“We’ve got a model we’ve been using for 140 years. I think it’s time to try something else.” Those were the words the mayor of Washington, D.C., Anthony Williams, was quoted by the Washington Post as offering to explain his newfound support for school vouchers. It wasn’t the most ringing endorsement ever heard, but coming from a Democratic mayor in a Democratic city, it was, for voucher proponents, the endorsement heard around the world.

While the politicians in some cities around the country — such as Cleveland and Milwaukee — have been awakened by the demand from inner-city residents for an alternative to our broken public school system, no prominent city has taken the plunge. While Washington ranks somewhere between Cleveland and Milwaukee in terms of population, there’s no denying that the symbolic value of a voucher program in the nation’s capital would be monumental. If the Bush administration manages to implement one, as it and some in Congress are trying to do, it might even have an impact in New York.

Certainly the case for vouchers in New York City is as compelling as that for vouchers in the District of Columbia. A policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom in Washington, Casey Lartigue, spelled out Washington’s situation in December in a report titled, “The Need for Educational Freedom in the Nation’s Capital.” In Washington, D.C., according to Mr. Lartigue’s report, an estimated 40% of students who start the 8th grade drop out or leave before graduating high school. Public school students there routinely performed below the national average on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills and score 222 points below the national average on the SAT. As Mr. Lartigue concludes,”the public schools in the District of Columbia have failed to provide children with an adequate education.”

Those words sound more than a passing bit similar to the recent decision of the New York State Court of Appeals in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, where the court found that New York City is not providing a “sound basic education” to its public school children. While the court’s actions in that case constituted a tremendous judicial power grab, its findings of fact echo the facts at Washington. Only 50% of high school students graduate in four years, and 30% do not graduate or receive a general equivalency degree by the age of 21, when they cease to be eligible for free public education, the New York court found. “This rate of school completion compares unfavorably with both state and national figures,” the court wrote. Further, the court wrote: “Between 1994 and 1998, the undisputed evidence showed that upwards of 30 percent of New York City sixth graders scored below the [State Reference Point] in reading …a score at the SRP means a child is barely literate, and hence over a third of City schoolchildren were functionally illiterate. Scores in science and social science showed New York City fourth, sixth, and eighth graders invariably in the lowest quartile statewide.” We would add to this that, according to state figures compiled by the Manhattan Institute, New York City’s SAT scores are roughly 100 points below the national average.

With per-pupil spending almost identical to one another — New York City spends $10,795 and Washington, D.C., spends $10,852, according to a recent report by the Education Intelligence Agency — both districts are indeed well-funded failures. As Mr. Williams put it, it’s “time to try something else.” Vouchers are the logical something else. “There is enough data to make this experiment worthwhile,” Mr. Williams told the Washington Post in an interview on Thursday. “You’ve got a welter of arguments on one side with data and on the other side with data. I think there’s enough substantiation to say it’s worth trying.” This is quite a different approach than that being taken by those ostensibly trying to break up the Tweed Trust. Schools Chancellor Klein has called vouchers a “sadly mistaken hypothesis,” and Mayor Bloomberg, who asked to be held responsible for school reform, has counseled patience with the current system. Last week, the mayor said, “For the moment, if we started focusing on vouchers it would be disruptive to the process. We’ve got to focus on making what we have work better.” And it is precisely on that point where Washington’s mayor seems to have bolted light years ahead of New York’s. Mr. Williams understands that inner-city parents have been waiting long enough. “We can spend money on a cure for what ails you, but the cure may be 20 to 30 years away,” Mr. Williams told a crowd earlier this month, when the Manhattan Institute awarded him its annual Urban Innovator Award for his support of vouchers. “We have kids who need help right now,” Washington’s mayor said. New York has such children, too.