ST. LOUIS EXPERIMENT MAY HOLD SCHOOL KEYS

Nine days ago, on an uncharacteristically breezy August afternoon, more than 200 people gathered in a tough, deteriorating neighborhood on the mean streets of north St. Louis, for what may prove a historic announcement. It is one of the most hopeful developments in St. Louis in many a year.

The location was at the former Perpetual Help School, which had been closed by the St. Louis Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church. Key to the coalition that intends to revitalize urban education in St. Louis is a group of ministers from the Church of God in Christ -- the nation's fastest-growing black denomination -- plus community activists, neighbors and parents. These folks joined with Peter Kinder of Cape Girardeau, who is president pro tem of the Missouri Senate, to announce the opening of St. Louis Academies, four new privately run schools, each serving grades kindergarten through eight.

These players represent a diverse coalition trying to give desperate parents alternatives to the bad city schools in which government has trapped their children. The coalition had long sought to open charter schools under the same banner. Potential charter-granting institutions rebuffed those efforts at every turn.

Instead of relying on state school funding, organizers plan to open with a mix of federal funding and donations.

By Sunday, even the skeptical St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a lengthy analysis piece that said this novel approach could, in fact, succeed, and quoted experts saying that while it had never been attempted before, it was "evidence of the entrepreneurialism in education today" and further evidence of the desperation of parents for alternatives to the existing inner-city public schools.

As evidence of that desperation, and the hope offered by St. Louis Academies, a woman was quoted in a Post-Dispatch news story earlier last week: "I jumped for joy when I saw this on the news," said this parent, who was at the academies' open house the next day looking to enroll her child in one of the new schools.

The Wall Street Journal's lead editorial on Monday (reprinted elsewhere on this page) found much to praise in the St. Louis effort. The St. Louis Acadamies announcement, the Journal said, "is a signal to education bureaucrats." Indeed it is. If this experiment succeeds, it will overshadow charter schools and school vouchers as the way to end the tax-funded hold of public schools on abysmal urban education.