It's difficult to argue with Lewis' hard-headed pragmatism. I asked Vice President Al Gore, who opposes vouchers, what he would say to a black mother like Hays who loves the voucher program. Would he tell her, Just say no?

Gore declined to comment on the specifics of the Cleveland case, citing the court challenges. But he said emphatically, "I don't think that we can tell any parent in this country that they ought to keep their children in a failing school for one more day." Gore then described his solution: "That's why I have proposed shutting down every failing school, and reopening it with a new principal, with full peer review of all teachers, new resources and a new school plan to make that school a success."

In the education world, that's known as "reconstitution" and it's controversial, especially among some teachers and school administrators. It's certainly not the usual talk one hears from Democrats. But Gore correctly calls the terrible state of poor, urban schools "a national emergency," and he knows that if he can't offer vouchers, he's got to come up with some radical plan -- what he constantly calls "revolutionary improvements."

Part of that plan is a huge commitment to spending more federal money on public education -- $115 billion over the next decade on "universal" preschool, as well as elementary through high school. That's the incentive. The new plan also threatens to close failing schools.

"Look at what Governor Hunt does in North Carolina," Gore suggested. "He had 15 failing schools. Shut them down, brought in a new team for each one of them with a new plan and new resources, and now 13 of those 15 schools are in the top rank of high-achieving schools in the state."

Texas Gov. George W. Bush has his own, quite radical plan to deal with the worst schools. He's proposing taking federal money away from failing schools and giving it directly to parents to spend as they see fit on their children's education. In effect, it's a national voucher plan, although he's nervous about using the controversial "v" word.

Ironically, as governor of Texas, Bush declined to promote vouchers, thereby alienating some Christian conservatives who finance their own voucher program in San Antonio. But now that Bush is the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party, he has adopted the party's penchant for vouchers.

In an interview for our "Frontline" documentary, Bush said he would tap the biggest federal education program, Title I, nearly $8 billion a year, which is given to schools with low-income students: "As opposed to subsidizing failure, we ought to free the parent to make a different choice."

Gore attacks Bush for implying that the Title I money -- anywhere from $500 to $1,500 per student -- would be enough to pay tuition at a private school. "That's a fraudulent claim," Gore charges, and he's right. A Cleveland voucher is worth up to $2,250 and that's barely enough to cover a modest Catholic school tuition.

But Bush doesn't always insist that the Title I voucher would pay for a private or Catholic school. He told "Frontline:" "It could be [another] public school. It could be a charter school. It could be a tutorial. It could be anything other than the status quo."

Chester Finn, a sometime advisor to Bush who was President Reagan's assistant secretary of education, readily admits that each parent would get a voucher worth no more than "six or eight or nine hundred dollars" if the Title I money is divided up. Finn says it could be spent on "an after-school program" or "something over the Internet."

Such a modest amount of money may not have the political appeal Bush seeks. But ironically, one of the architects and early implementers of the Title I program, Michael Kirst, a Democrat and Stanford education professor, agrees that Title I has outlived its usefulness and should be disbursed to parents of poor children.

Kirst knows the money won't pay for much more than some tutoring, but he says that's better than nothing. Kirst believes there is a genuine crisis in school systems like Oakland, which he has studied for Mayor Jerry Brown, and desperate times demand new experiments. "The Oakland schools are so bad, I wouldn't send a juvenile delinquent to one," says Kirst.

That sort of brash statement has resonance in a city like Cleveland, where people are fed up enough with the schools to speak their minds. Teacher union president Richard DeColibus says working conditions in the public schools are still so bad that it's very hard to retain good teachers. "We hired 500 teachers last year, 140 of 'em are already gone." The biggest problems, he says, are still discipline and overcrowding in the classroom, especially in middle schools."

Lewis is savvy enough to know you can't blame everything on the schools. She readily recites a litany of urban woes, stressing how many kids have absent parents.

"Do you know what it's like to grow up without either one of your parents?" she asks. "Those youngsters when they go to school, they got to fight. They just mad. You got youngsters in the juvenile system that are hard and cold now because they're not getting any love. Nobody cares about them."

But Lewis refuses to let schools off the hook. "We need to keep our children busy," she tells me. "They ought to go to school year round. Six days a week." If not, she fears another generation of black urban youth will be lost.

"Without an education, how you gonna get a job?" she shouts. "The less education you got, the less money you going to make. If you want six figures, you got to have some sense."

She's on a roll now, preaching, but dead serious: "Our youngsters don't just have to compete with kids in Cleveland. They've got to compete globally. And if these youngsters cannot get exposed to a computer, then they're going to be illiterate."

Vouchers are, at the moment, a tiny, almost marginal experiment. In practice, in Cleveland, they certainly represent taxpayer support for religious schools -- it's ridiculous to pretend they don't. And vouchers may indeed siphon money and the most-motivated parents from an already debilitated public school system.

But vouchers represent something very profound -- a desperate cry from the poorest African-Americans in our inner cities that their schools are a mess and no one seems to care.

In the suburbs, no one's talking about vouchers. A short trolley car ride from downtown Cleveland is one of the finest public high schools in America, Shaker Heights, a thoroughly integrated school, half black, half white, committed to excellence with the resources of a solidly upper-middle-class community to support it. They've even got their own planetarium.

Even in Cleveland, there are a few outstanding "alternative" schools -- like the Newton D. Baker Elementary School with an arts-based curriculum that attracts a multiracial student body from all over the city. The test scores are strong and the music, theater and painting have reached some kids who might otherwise have lost interest in school. But Baker is an exception -- the creation of an extraordinarily willful and dedicated principal, Yvonne Aguilera.

For those who lack the resources of a Shaker Heights, or who languish on the waiting lists trying to get into one of the few wonderful alternative schools in Cleveland, the appeal of vouchers will surely grow. It's an appeal that Democrats, teachers unions and civil rights leaders ignore at their own peril.

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