Go to Barack Obama's campaign website, click on the education link, and there you will read many ideas like this: "Obama's plan will expand mentoring programs that pair experienced teachers with new recruits. He will also provide incentives to give teachers paid common planning time so they can collaborate to share best practices." On Hillary Clinton's website, you will see she wants to create "Green Schools in order to reduce energy costs and eliminate environmental hazards that can hinder children's development."

Is there another policy area where jargon, claptrap, and political correctness have such free rein as education? Perhaps that is why it is both astonishing and refreshing to find in the pages of the most recent City Journal a vibrant and bracing exchange about the future of the school reform movement. It is a must-read for anyone who has any interest in the future of education policy.

What gives the City Journal debate an edge is that it begins with apostasy. Sol Stern is a long-time warrior for school choice and vouchers, having written a book on the subject and numerous well-researched and persuasive articles. Now, to the dismay of his erstwhile intellectual allies, he has changed his mind. His article "School Choice Isn't Enough" makes the case that after more than a decade of conservative and libertarian agitating, the school choice and voucher movements have been a colossal failure. He points out that today there are only three tiny voucher programs supported by public funds, one in Cleveland, one in Milwaukee, and another in Washington, D.C., while most other "parental choice" proposals have been resoundingly defeated in elections. In Utah--Utah!--a school choice proposal was defeated almost two-to-one.

But Stern's more devastating critique is that, where they have existed, school choice programs have failed to deliver the improvements promised by advocates:

Fifteen years into the most expansive school choice program tried in any urban school district in the country, Milwaukee's public schools still suffer from low achievement and miserable graduation rates, with test scores flattening in recent years. Violence and disorder throughout the system seem as serious as ever. Most voucher students are still benefiting, true; but no "Milwaukee miracle," no transformation of the public schools, has taken place.

Stern's reluctant discovery that school choice is not working came as he listened more closely to education scholars Diane Ravitch and E.D. Hirsch Jr., two of the most influential writers about education reform who have long battled the education professionals and the graduate Ed School establishment. Although Ravitch and Hirsch have been allies of the conservative education reform movement, they have never been cheerleaders for school choice in particular. Instead they are "instructionists," believing that the curriculum and the way it is taught are far more consequential to improving failed schools.

Stern is now convinced that they are right and that the "incentivists"--those who believe that bringing market structure and competition to school systems--are wrong. He points to recent success in Massachusetts, where there is no school choice, few charter schools, and very little in the way of competition to improve teaching. Yet under the strong leadership of smart, content-focused reformers who make the liberal education establishment bristle, Massachusetts instituted a more rigorous curriculum, a focus on phonics and early reading, and real tests for its teachers. Over the last 15 years, school performance has improved far more than in most other states. In 2007, Massachusetts placed first in the nation in the fourth and eighth grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math tests, universally regarded as the best measure of student performance.