President Obama will not improve education by making speeches in front of America’s schoolchildren. A better approach would be to start a nationwide school tuition voucher program that would enable low-income parents to afford the same type of education he is able to provide for his own daughters.

Vouchers have already been tried in some cities, such as Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. According the National Bureau of Economic Research, the voucher program in Milwaukee improved both graduation rates and test scores. “Standardized math test scores rose significantly more rapidly for students who used vouchers to attend private schools than for their counterparts in public schools,” said Cecelia Rouse, a faculty research fellow at NBER.