IN THE summer of 2011 a 16-year-old girl called Dayana Vazquez-Buquer arrived at the reception desk of Roncalli High School, a nice private school in the south side of Indianapolis. Her parents were Mexican immigrants who could not afford the $8,030 tuition fees. Yet Miss Vazquez-Buquer felt Roncalli would be better for her than her current public school and said she had heard about a new school voucher scheme that would pay most of the fees. She was correct. Today she is a student at Roncalli and on track to attend university.

The voucher scheme, potentially the biggest in America, was set up a year ago as part of a big package of educational reforms led by Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels, and his superintendent of schools. These include teacher evaluations that take student performance into account, giving school heads more autonomy and encouraging the growth of charter schools. Jeanne Allen, president of the Centre for Education Reform, a Washington-based advocacy group, says the reforms are unique because Indiana has looked at education reform in its “totality”, rather than taking a piecemeal approach as many other states have done.

Nationally there are now 32 school voucher programs in 16 states and Washington, DC, serving at least 210,000 students. Yet despite their limited reach vouchers are controversial. Parents with vouchers use them to enter private education, and so detractors argue they drain finance from public schools and “privatise” education. Another concern is that vouchers can be used at religious schools and therefore erode the barrier between church and state.

However, as vouchers often pay less than the cost of educating a single pupil in public schools, they offer a way for a state to make savings in education spending, while increasing choice for parents. Moreover, the Indiana scheme has allayed fears that vouchers will not reach their target audience of low-income families. In the first year about 85-90% of children receiving them have come from households that qualify for free school lunches. Moderate-income families can receive a voucher with a lower value.

Mr Daniels thinks that vouchers are first and foremost a question of social justice. “There is no good reason a low-income person should have a narrower range of schools or be compelled to attend a school for lack of income. The state’s role is to provide an education but the choice of the mode of education should be left to the parent,” he says.

Indiana’s philosophy of promoting choice has also extended to making it possible for students to apply to any public school—including those outside the school district in which the child lives. And some signs suggest greater choice is having a positive effect in Indiana. For one thing, some public schools have started to compete for students. They are advertising their educational prowess directly to parents, through billboard signs on highways, mailing campaigns and clothes carrying slogans. Schools are trying to make themselves more attractive to students, for example by buying iPads.

The reforms have had already phenomenal results, according to Mrs Allen. Tony Bennett, the superintendent of public instruction in Indiana, arrived in 2009. Every student performance indicator has improved he says and over the last two years the state has ranked second in the country for achievement on college-level courses taken in high school. Graduation rates from high school are at an all-time high.

The appeal of vouchers seems likely to grow and they are already being tried in many other Republican-led states. Yet Mr Daniels says he would be surprised if the Indiana voucher program ever attracted more than a small percentage of children. Is it worth the trouble? Mr Daniels reckons that for the few children whose parents actually get around to using the vouchers, it may make a lifetime of difference. Even if it is only a marginal few percent that migrate to private schools, he says “so much of life is settled at the margins”.