One thing both presidential candidates agree on is that we should encourage the growth of charter public schools: public schools that enlist students by choice, that are strictly accountable for measurable educational results, and that are free from bureaucratic micro-management in determining how they achieve those results. New Democrats are proud to have helped push the charter school movement into the national limelight during the 1990s, and are now working -- in the Administration, in Congress, and in states and localities around the country -- to move it to the next level.

That will be a tough but important challenge. Many conservatives support charter public schools as little more than a transitional device toward their real goal: public taxpayer support for private schools through tax or voucher tuition subsidies. Many liberals either don't support charters at all, or want to keep them as a minor "experiment" on the margins of public education.

Last week a very important voice joined New Democrats in pushing for full realization of the charter public school idea: Hugh Price, long-time president of the National Urban League, one of the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organizations. At the League's 90th Annual Convention in New York, Price called for making every urban school a charter school -- not just a few, not just a lot, but all of them:

Successful schools typically are led by highly motivated principals and teachers, who are on a mission to make certain their youngsters do well academically.... These high performing educators cherish their autonomy and flourish because of it.

They also take pride in setting lofty standards for themselves and their students. They don't shun accountability. Far from it. They relish it and use high standards to stay on course.

Every urban school should enjoy this combination of autonomy and accountability. That's the essence of charter schools, when they work the way they should.

Price first suggested a "total charter" approach in an article in Education Week last December, as part of a comprehensive strategy that included higher teachers' pay and an end to teacher tenure. Stressing the urgency of education reform, he said:

Few if any urban districts can honestly claim they educate the vast majority of youngsters remotely up to their potential.... What's urgently needed is truly radical reform that structures public education so that its raison d'etre is student success.

The call for such radical reform -- for charter public schools as a new model, not as a transition or as an experiment -- is spreading. Last year, the Education Commission of the States endorsed the "total charter" approach as one of two feasible strategies for greatly improving student achievement, as described by David Osborne, the father of the "reinventing government" movement, in the Washington Post Magazine on July 23. And though it has not gotten much attention, Vice President Al Gore has called for new federal help to rapidly expand charter public schools in exactly those urban school districts Hugh Price is talking about.

Charter public schools can and should provide a Third Way between continuation of the old one-size-fits-all public school (which Huge Price said in his New York speech should be "blown up" or converted into "mixed income apartments and coops"), and abandonment of public schools in favor of subsidies for unaccountable private schools. It's time to move to the next and higher level.