Not surprisingly, the school district has resisted this idea, just as public schools have fought vouchers for decades. What makes this case different is that the litigants are not ideological conservatives bent on privatizing public education, but frustrated minority families who simply want to take back one of their basic rights -- the power to make decisions about how best, and where, to educate their daughters and sons.

As so often in the past, their action may bear little fruit . . . for now. But like a battering ram that gradually hammers through the thickest fortress wall, frustrated parents are shaking America's last great monopoly -- public education -- to its roots. Too many families now recognize that too many public schools, especially in the inner city, do a bad job of educating their children. The public school model of, in effect, "manufacturing" children to good citizenship, adequate skills and a shared civic culture, too frequently doesn’t work. The evidence for this failure in crime and illiteracy statistics is overwhelming.

What's needed in American education as we begin the new school year is not cosmetic reforms, but systemic rethinking of how and why we teach children anything. We need to turn away from the monopoly-model of public education we've used for decades and move instead to a more organic view of how society operates and how children learn. Society, like the human person, is not a machine. It’s an ecology that can only thrive by encouraging a variety of complementary educational systems. And if we can bring that about more quickly and justly by reempowering parents to ensure the effectiveness of their schools through their checkbooks -- then so be it. Parents are, after all, the primary educators of their children. Some form of vouchers to assist them in that responsibility is long overdue.

“Small” can work. Limited budgets can frequently produce far better results than heavily funded ones. Catholic schools all over the country offer the living proof.

At Loyola Catholic School in Denver's inner city, more than 80 percent of the students are African-American, and more than half are non-Catholic. Many struggle with poverty. But like its Catholic sister schools elsewhere in the inner city, Loyola enjoys a superior learning environment with active parental support. It also boasts an atmosphere of positive discipline, strong moral formation and a competitive academic program. As a result, Loyola students learn not merely facts, but the mutual respect and personal pride which come from genuine achievement.

The outstanding performance of northern Colorado's Catholic schools -- which, by the way, enjoy 22 percent minority enrollment -- parallels the national Catholic school record of success. The result is a growing demand for their services in Colorado -- ironically, one of the least "churched" states in the nation -- and the high satisfaction rating they enjoy from parents and pastors alike. Total local enrollment is now greater than at any time since the mid-1980s and has grown in each of the past 11 years. Dropout rates are low. Graduation rates are high. Bureaucracies are small. Student to teacher ratios are very positive. Colorado young people who've had a Catholic school education go on to enrich and contribute to the entire community.

Most important of all, Catholic schools provide not only facts, but a moral framework for what the facts mean. They involve and reinforce families. They build a sense of community. They form as well as inform. As Francis Bacon wrote nearly 500 years ago and as today’s "information society" demonstrates, knowledge is power. But power without wisdom, understanding, compassion, restraint and conscience is an extremely dangerous thing. These qualities of the heart are the real meat of a Catholic education; the raw material of the genuinely human person.

One of our national contradictions, of course, is that education “success stories” like these Catholic schools are officially discouraged by being barred from most public support. This, despite the fact that virtually all other advanced industrial democracies do provide financial aid to religious and private schools, with no damage to their political integrity. In other words, in real world experience, any Church-state confusions arising from public support for religious and private schools are clearly solvable. And vouchers, which put financial power directly into the hands of parents rather than school authorities, would make Churchstate entanglements even less likely.

My point here is not that Catholic schools should replace government-run ones. They aren't designed to. Thousands of good teachers and administrators work hard in public education to make a positive difference for children. They deserve our gratitude and respect. Additionally, any voucher system must solve the practical problem of the extraordinary funding and programming required to educate specialneeds children at the schools their parents choose.

Catholic schools do deserve to grow and thrive, however. They clearly have much to offer the larger U.S. public, both materially and by way of example. In the service they provide, they embody authentic pluralism: i.e., different traditions working for the common good of all; remaining who they are, but complementing each other’s efforts to the enrichment of the whole community.

Catholic schools already do an outstanding job of serving the poor and minorities, and they’re eager to do more. Earlier this year, for example, Denver education activists, entrepreneurs and local corporate leaders came together to form the Seeds of Hope Charitable Trust, a Colorado partnership to raise funds for hundreds of new inner-city scholarships annually. These will enable even more economically disadvantaged children to attend Catholic schools. Other dioceses are doing the same across the country.

Too many failures in public education over too long a time have finally -- and rightly -- caught up with us as a culture. To argue today that the U.S. Constitution is so allergic to religion that no public means can be found to help parents access Catholic and other good alternative schools, lacks credibility. It also lacks justice -- and perhaps honesty as well. Next year, Colorado is likely to face another fierce ballot battle over vouchers, and sooner or later vouchers will win and should win, because "business as usual" in public education no longer works -- especially for the poor.

Yet strangely, even the best and brightest in our public education establishment don't quite seem to get that message. Rudy Crew, chancellor of the New York City school system and an impressive educator by any standards, is quoted in a recent New York Times magazine profile as saying, "We don't have a lot of time, which is why I feel this incredible urgency [for reform]. I think we have 10 years, tops, to turn the [public school] system around before the public gets fed up and begins to replace it with something else."

He may already be too late. The process has already begun.