Yesterday, leaders in D.C. stood together in an act of civil protest in front of the Board of Education Building to oppose the loss of scholarships for 216 disadvantaged children in the D.C. area.

Congress has refused to fund new scholarships (though it is paying out scholarships already in use) pending a reauthorization of the program by the House, which many consider a long shot.

Unfortunately, this flies in the face of the lesson D.C. is trying to impress upon states engaged in education reform, that is, to innovate new programs, test their success and stick with things that work. These scholarships are one tool, along with Charter schools and magnet schools, that parents can utilize to help their child realize his or her potential. And it works on many levels. It gets the parents engaged. It shows educational progress over time. And it costs about one-fourth of what taxpayers pay to send a child to public school.

Parents are staring down failing public schools in D.C., just like we are here in St. Louis. To see that Congress isn’t taking this reform seriously makes all reformers across the country uneasy. We’ve got some great leaders out of D.C. like former Mayor Anthony Williams who helped secure the scholarships, Superintendent of DC Public Schools Michelle Rhee, who’s said that her job is to make sure children get the best education possible, even if that’s outside the public schools, and has stepped up as a hardcore reformer who is tirelessly looking for the next right thing.

We can learn a lot from those leaders: they made unpopular choices that went against the grain, but won many of their detractors over as they showed improvement. We’ve got great potential in St. Louis to replicate these conditions and create reforms that aggressively roots out disparity, waste, complacency and put in its place rewards for achievement, options that reflect the heterogeneous nature of urban communities, and footholds that make knowledge easier to grasp.

In St. Louis, we need an at-the-gut exposure of the problems, and a reaction that hits the core of those problems. We know they’re bigger than the classroom, and that’s why it has to be a community-wide effort with seamless partnerships that can’t be about partisan inheritance, only measurable solutions.