Thanks to an outbreak of reason in Columbia, Gov. Mark Sanford's assertion that private-school competition can improve public schools has a chance to get a fair test. As amended, the Put Parents in Charge Act would establish an 11-year pilot program in two of South Carolina's 85 school districts - one rich, one poor - to be selected by the S.C. Department of Education.

We say "chance" for two reasons:

This scaled-down version of the Put Parents in Charge Act, which would grant parents living in the chosen school districts state income and property-tax credits for private-school tuition, needs first to clear the General Assembly and gain Sanford's signature. It will be up for House floor debate next week, then will move on to the Senate if S.C. representatives pass it.

If the amended bill becomes law, the S.C. Department of Education needs to administer the pilot program fairly. There's legitimate reason to doubt the department's capacity for fairness on this issue. Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum, the department's boss, vehemently has opposed Put Parents in Charge as an attack on public education.

Not that Tenenbaum was wrong to do this. In a sense, the original measure, which would have granted the tuition tax credits to parents statewide, is an attack on public education.

If that weren't so, why would Put Parents in Charge supporters have flooded S.C. mailboxes and airwaves with out-of-context factoids aimed at making the public schools seem less effective than they really are? This strategy was unfair and irritating - and ultimately self-defeating.

South Carolinians who care about public school performance, it turned out, understand that public schools also have improved dramatically under the data-driven school report card system legislatively mandated in the late 1990s. If there were broad public dissatisfaction with the pace of S.C. school improvement, Put Parents in Charge would have passed as originally written, a month or two ago. In that sense, supporters' public relations campaign failed.

At the same time, though, public school supporters also failed to establish that the world as we know it would end (so to speak) if the state devoted public dollars to private education. They never refuted Put Parents in Charge supporters' argument that public schools could benefit from a little competition.

Now, if all goes well, public schools in two S.C. districts will be subjected to competition. Even though the amended bill falls short on accountability for performance, the 10-year school choice pilot program should generate a body of rich, if unscientific, information on whether kids truly benefit from a public-to-private-school switch.

Would this be the nose of the camel in the tent of public education, with the rest of the beast to follow? Only if Put Parents in Charge supporters turn out to have been correct about the benefits of private competition for schoolchildren. It should be interesting, really interesting, to see whether this approach to school quality benefits our kids as much as supporters say it will.