Beware of politicians who offer choice and diversity in education. Buried beneath the verbiage, there nearly always lies some new wheeze for helping middle-class parents to keep their offspring away from the rougher sort of working-class or ethnic-minority child. The grammar schools, for many years, performed this function perfectly. Nearly all the fiddling with secondary schools over the past 30 years have been attempts to restore, to middle-class parents, the right to wangle the system to their own children's advantage.

Whatever the labels - assisted places, city technology colleges, grant-maintained schools, foundation schools or voluntary-aided church schools - the results are the same. Parents storm the gates, sensing exclusivity. Lower-class children are left behind in the rush, to attend what the Prime Minister's spokesman calls the "bog-standard comprehensive". Yet research shows that the best way to raise those children's attainment is for them to rub shoulders with their more privileged peers. The most successful comprehensives for children from poor homes are those that admit a cross-section of abilities, social backgrounds and races - a "balanced intake". Such schools do not damage pupils from more affluent homes. Yet they are almost non-existent in English cities, where education is socially and often racially segregated to a high degree. If anybody suggested "busing" pupils to end such segregation, parents would rise up as though against child abuse. Instead, we encourage parents to bus (or, rather, four-wheel drive) their children across cities in search of maximum exclusivity.

The newly published education green paper must be judged against this background. Those who criticise the projected expansion of specialist schools - in business, engineering, science, arts, sport, technology and languages - as blows to the "comprehensive ideal" miss the point. In urban areas at least, the ideal has never come anywhere near being realised; and so established is the belief in parental choice (though the choice is often bogus) that there is no prospect of its being realised in the foreseeable future. In that sense, the comprehensive system is indeed a failure, because the moment to sell it politically passed long ago. The sooner that old Labour and teachers' union stalwarts accept this truth the better. They have as much chance of seeing genuine comprehensives in their lifetimes as they have of seeing nationalised banks.

The Tories' grant-maintained schools were educationally meaningless. They were merely code for "posh". David Blunkett's specialist schools have a coherent and defensible purpose. It makes no economic sense to equip all schools to teach several languages or high-level computing or a wide range of musical instruments, and attempts to do so would lead to more of the giant schools that did so much to damage public perceptions of the comprehensive system. Equally, it makes no sense to deny these things - which are widely provided in the private sector - to some state schools because all cannot have them. That is to play into the hands of those who argue that the left stands for levelling-down, not levelling-up. It also betrays a rigid cast of mind because it ignores the opportunities for schools to share specialist resources.

The crucial test will be whether specialist schools lead to more or less social mixing. The danger is that the division between them and the bog-standard comprehensives simply reinforces existing divisions. If they really wanted to avoid that- as opposed to hoovering up more middle-class votes - ministers could insist that, beyond the 10 per cent of pupils selected by aptitude, all other places in specialist schools (where there is a surplus of applicants) be allocated by lottery. Or they could make the acceptance of a certain percentage of children who qualify for free meals (the best available proxy for poverty) a condition of specialist school status. Best of all, they could give all urban secondary schools a specialism by, say, 2010. Since there is no obvious hierarchy in the seven specialisms proposed, we can at least hope that the preferences for them will be randomly distributed across the social classes. They preserve parental choice (a political sine qua non), but give parents grounds other than social exclusivity on which to choose.

None of this is perfect. The middle classes will always manipulate the education system to their advantage, as they manipulate every other public service. But David Blunkett's specialist schools scheme at least creates the possibility of a fairer system.

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