Governor Weingarten

School choice advocates are patting themselves on the back after a budget negotiating session in Albany in which the number of charter schools permitted to be opened in the state was doubled to 200 from 100, and it is an achievement, given the formidable forces set against choice in education. Still, from where we sit, what is stunning is how formidable is the power wielded by the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten.

On the charter school issue alone, one wonders why there is any cap at all. At the Carl Icahn charter school in the Bronx, for example, which uses the E.D. Hirsch core knowledge curriculum beloved by our columnist Andrew Wolf, the school's Web site reports, "The School maintains a waiting list of hundreds of children for the various grades. For the new Kindergarten class in the fall, there were six applications for every space." Why not allow the creation of enough charter schools to meet the demand in full? While the school choice advocates are crowing that they avoided a blanket mandatory unionization, the law that was passed effectively limits the size of newly created charter schools by imposing a union, without any employee election, on schools that exceed 250 students in their first two years.

But the issue is broader than charter schools. The union and its allies managed to defeat Mr. Spitzer's proposal for a $1000 tax deduction for private school tuition, a deduction that would have meant a measly $70 or $80 in the pockets of parents who don't use the public schools that they pay for in their taxes. A coalition of religious leaders including Edward Cardinal Egan, the rabbis who head the Orthodox Union and the National Council of Young Israel, and the Reverends Floyd Flake and Johnny Ray Youngblood sent a last minute appeal on behalf of "the families of half a million school children," framing their battle as one against "special interests and entrenched powers," in particular, "the public school teachers' lobbyists and the legislators beholden to them." The religious leaders and the private and religious school parents lost this round to the special interests, though Mr. Spitzer, through his spokeswoman, is vowing to press onward. The teachers have every right to advocate in Albany, but the religious leaders and the parents on the waiting lists for charters sure could use some advocates up there as formidable as Ms. Weingarten.