The teacher union grip on our Democrat-dominated state Assembly assures that students in most of Nevada's public schools continue to flounder in a climate of enforced mediocrity. Yet only a few hours' drive away, two of our neighboring states are among the nation's leaders in a growing and healthy trend to impose the rigors of competition on foot-dragging educrats.

If you want to hear some squawking from complacent school administrators, just mention "school choice."

Utah's new plan is means-tested, meaning it provides less aid to parents seeking better schools for their kids if those parents make the mistake of working hard and earning more.

Nonetheless, the Utah Legislature earlier this month enacted a revolutionary "universal school choice" bill. (It cleared the lower house in a nail-biting 38-37 vote.) The program would hand a voucher worth $500 to $3,000 -- the latter about half of what Utah spends per pupil in its public schools -- to any Utah child not already in a private school, allowing that child's parents to move the kid to any Utah school of their choice, so long as the school employs college graduates as teachers and administers norm-referenced tests.

Unfortunately, the Utah bill continues to pay the public school which that child has fled for another five years, definitely limiting the "cold shower" effect on failing administrators.

Still, empty seats speak volumes.

Meantime, across the river to the south, Arizona already operates at least six separate educational aid programs to help students exercise choice in public, private and religious schools -- two of them specifically supporting services for foster children and children with disabilities. Those six voucher programs currently serve more than 22,000 students a year, totaling nearly $22 million in publicly funded scholarships.

How much do the teacher unions and their allies hate this? So "desperate ... are school choice opponents to halt meaningful education reform," says Tim Keller, executive director of the Arizona chapter of the Institute for Justice, that last November the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona and the so-called People for the American Way filed the first-ever legal challenge to a scholarship program that provides tuition grants for children with disabilities.

(There are four similar programs nationwide; all the others have flourished without legal challenge, Mr. Keller reports.)

The groups "didn't like the fact that parents had been empowered to choose private schools," Mr. Keller explains. The plaintiffs claimed that the new scholarship programs violated the Arizona Constitution because they allow public funds to pay for educating children in private schools -- despite the fact that the Arizona Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected those arguments in school choice and school finance cases, Mr. Keller says.

Mind you, the lawsuit did not challenge the placement of handicapped kids in these same private schools so long as that placement was done at the discretion of some public school bureaucrat. Only parents who used the state scholarship vouchers and placed their kids in the schools themselves -- by "choice" -- were challenged, Mr. Keller explains.

"It is difficult to call school choice opponents' selective legal challenge anything short of hypocritical," Mr. Keller writes in the Institute for Justice February newsletter. "But their hypocrisy is not surprising. The teachers' unions' allies fear the accountability that naturally accompanies parental choice programs and the pressure to enact genuine reforms that follows empowered parents. This legal challenge, perhaps more than any previous school choice lawsuit, demonstrated that what choice opponents truly fear is empowering parents."

On Jan. 9, the Institute for Justice won the first round: The Arizona Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Is school choice a magic wand? No.

"Dramatic results should not be expected overnight," warns Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Education Reform. "Competition and consumer choice work wonderfully well in education, but their effects are not instantaneous.

But, "those caveats aside, this is a momentous day not just for Utah families, but for our entire nation," Mr. Coulson wrote upon hearing news of the school choice plan passing in Utah. "What Utah's legislature has figured out is that school choice is a much better way of fulfilling the promise of public education than is the one-size-fits-all factory school system we inherited from the 19th century."

The system, that is to say, in which Nevada's kids still find themselves in permanent lockdown.