A billionaire's plan to rescue--or ruin--public education.

Ask Tim Draper, the principal backer of this year''s school voucher initiative, what he wants to be remembered for and the man hardly hesitates.

"Viral marketing and education," he told me in an interview last spring. The former made Draper and fellow venture capitalists John Fisher and Steve Jurvetson multimillionaires when Draper attached the slug "P.S. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail" to the bottom of the Internet''s first free e-mail service, letting the Web do the work of spreading the marketing message.

Draper''s intended educational legacy, if Proposition 38 passes on Nov. 7, will cast him in the role of founding father of a state education system that is a world away from the one we have now. Under Draper''s proposal, any parent in California could take a $4,000 voucher from the state--roughly the amount the state spends on a student in a year--and hand it to a private school as part of tuition. The state would neither regulate the schools nor test the students.

Supporters say vouchers would offer parents choices in education regardless of income and spur public schools to improve their performance. Critics contend the plan would cripple the public school system by siphoning money away--precisely the last thing it needs.

Draper is not an educator. An engineer by training and entrepreneur by instinct, he arrived in the world of political reform by way of parental involvement. When his daughter was in third grade, Draper invented an entrepreneurial game called BizWorld, which he later turned into a free franchise. One day while he was teaching a group of fifth graders how to manufacture and market friendship bracelets, a distinguished guest sat in on the class. Evidently Gayle Wilson was impressed. In 1998 her husband, then-Gov. Pete Wilson, appointed Draper to the state Board of Education.

There Draper''s entrepreneurial impatience met the plodding pace of the education bureaucracy. Like most other Californians in the late ''90s, Draper was convinced there was a crisis in education, and he wanted it addressed. But it seemed to him that even the internal reform mechanism of charter schools was inexorably gumming up, thanks to the system''s endless rulemaking. "Little by little, what I saw happening is they were going to chip away at charter schools so they look just like public schools," he recalls. "You can''t change a public school; it''s a monopoly. I determined that fixing it from within was not doable." And his idea for a voucher initiative was born.

Vouchers failed once before in California, spectacularly. In 1993, the California Teachers Association pumped $13 million into its war chest to trounce Prop. 174 by a margin of 70 to 30. This time, Draper has famously sworn to spend $40 million of his own money to push Prop. 38 through. Since July, each camp--one headed by Draper, the other by CTA--has spent $20 million on its campaign. The latest polls show Californians rejecting vouchers by 53-38 percent, with the rest undecided. The CTA is working furiously to put more distance between the two figures.

There is a list of scenarios that haunt anti-voucher activists. Public money going to private schools that teach religious doctrine. Private schools turning away students with learning or physical disabilities, leaving the teaching of those expensive-to-educate kids to a fiscally depleted public system. The proliferation of fly-by-night schools hungry for guaranteed government dollars, schools that open without so much as a building or a textbook to call their own. Stratification and ghettoization among private schools, with schools serving select demographics. Crumbling public schools drained of already-scarce resources.

But the worst part, says Jim Gutman, a services consultant for CTA''s Monterey/Santa Cruz/San Benito chapter, is the underlying principle of giving money to students whose parents are the kind who, well, send their kids to private schools.

"It''s a huge rip-off of the public," Gutman says, "sort of a reverse Robin Hood--stealing from the poor and giving to the rich." Most private schools cost more than $4,000, he notes--which means either the only kids who can take advantage of the program have parents who can afford the balance, or that an entire crop of inexpensive private schools will spring up. In any case, Prop. 38 is not going to enable poor kids to go to the highest quality private schools. Tuition at Monterey County''s own York School, for example, is $14,000 per year.

Curiously, Gutman points out, there is one detail about the voucher initiative that has received little attention. There are currently 700,000 students attending private school in the state. If each of them got a voucher, it would total $2.8 billion, and it would come from the part of the state budget that provides services like police and fire protection. And that does not even begin to address the students who would leave the public schools. That money would come directly out of the education budget, making projects like facilities repair even harder than they are now.

Greg Doyle, communications director for the Wisconsin Department of Instruction, has been talking to a lot of reporters from California lately. At 10 years old, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program is the oldest voucher system in the country, and this year will spend $70 million to educate 11,000 students. Besides the lack of accountability by the 10 or so new private schools that appear in Milwaukee each year, Doyle finds the voucher system philosophically troubling. Public education has been the great equalizer, and if it''s crippled, there will be reverberations throughout the society.

"It seems we are coming up with a million ways to abandon an institution that is so critical to our republic," he says, "and doing that will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots."