In the United States, public law requires that all buildings be constructed with clearly marked emergency exits. No one questions the need for this rule; it's common sense. If there's a fire or some other disaster, the occupants need to have a means of escape.

Ironically, that logic seems to apply to every aspect of our culture except one: the education policies that affect our kids. Think about it: We build ships with plenty of life preservers and lifeboats. We provide escape hatches in airliners and equip movie theaters with impossible-to-miss exits. But we don't give disadvantaged children a way out of dangerous, failing schools.

President Bush has described learning as the new civil right --- a right denied to hundreds of thousands of students in our country. Today, nearly 70 percent of inner-city and rural fourth-graders cannot read at a basic level.

Suburban parents are more likely to have the financial means to send their children to private schools if they outperform public ones. But low-income parents aren't afforded this luxury.

As a new study by the National Center for Policy Analysis concludes, America has a system of school choice, but it's closed to low-income and minority Americans. What we don't have is equal educational opportunity.

Federal law prohibits parents of students in failing schools from using their child's share of federal funds to transfer to safer, better-performing institutions. Instead, the federal government uses education dollars to subsidize failure, trapping disadvantaged students in schools without hope and often condemning them to an uphill battle later in life.

In the coming days, Congress will act on Bush's No Child Left Behind bill, co-authored by Rep. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) and co-sponsored by Rep. Charlie Norwood and other Georgia Republicans. The plan would arm parents with information about their children's schools and academic progress, giving them a report card every year on every public school.

While offering extra help to schools that don't perform, it would give new options to parents, including a choice "safety valve" for students trapped in failing schools that refuse to change.

The "safety valve" works like this: If a school is identified a low-performing after one year, it qualifies for extra help, and parents have the option to send their child to a better-performing public school.

If it's still failing after three years, parents can consider using their child's share of federal funds to transfer the child to any better-performing school --- public, private or charter --- or to obtain supplemental educational services such as tutoring.

The president's choice proposal enjoys popular support. According to a bipartisan Tarrance Group/Quinlan Greenberg poll conducted recently for the National Education Association, 63 percent of American voters support it.

Choice was kept out of the Senate version of the bill. But this week, I will offer a version of the president's plan in the House Education committee that includes it. Make no mistake: the same forces that defeated Congress' first school choice bill, which I co-sponsored in the early 1990s, will pull out all the stops to ensure that the status quo survives.

Since 1965, Washington has spent nearly $130 billion in a well-intentioned but failed effort to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their peers.

Dramatic changes are warranted to improve troubled schools. Money alone cannot be the vehicle for change. What's needed is accountability.

And parents should be empowered with new tools and options that encourage their direct involvement. Recent studies such as Jay Greene's Manhattan Institute report on the Florida choice system have proven that the simple act of giving parents the power to do what they think is best for their children --- even if only as a last resort --- can compel some of the worst schools to improve.

It is infinitely more important to preserve the hopes and dreams of a child than to preserve an inanimate, terminally failing object. Federal education policy should reflect this. Let's make sure there's an escape route for disadvantaged students in failing, dangerous schools.