Quite a commotion has erupted at Michigan this month as the mayor of Detroit and governor turned their noses up at a $200 million gift offered to the public school system by philanthropist Robert Thompson. A retired asphalt magnate, Mr. Thompson offered to give the money to set up 15 new high schools. The catch was that the new schools would be charter schools. This turned out to be too much for the Detroit teachers union, which did its best to defeat the deal. It would be nice to think that no such a foulup could happen in New York.

Michigan passed a charter school law in 1993, five years before New York state, and set a cap on the number of charters that could be granted under the law at 150, compared to 100 in the Empire State. So at first blush it looks like Michigan is the more amenable climate to charter schools. Furthermore, the 150 charters in Michigan all have been granted, whereas New York has given away only about half of its available charters.

Having hit the cap, Republican legislators in Michigan, who had pushed for the original legislation, have been looking for ways to reach an agreement with Governor Granholm, a Democrat, on raising the cap. Nothing has been working. “They’ve been like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football,” according to a legislative policy analyst at Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Jack McHugh. Then, about a year ago and unsolicited, Mr. Thompson rode to the rescue with his offer of a large and generous gift.

With the prospective gift on the table, the Legislature tried this: Both houses passed a bill authorizing just the 15 new high schools Mr. Thompson was proposing to donate. Immediately, the Legislature began negotiations with the governor, and, for a time, it looked like the governor would sign on and bring along Detroit’s Democratic mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick. Then the unofficial teachers union strike hit. The union emailed its members to all take a personal day at the same time to go and march on Lansing. The pseudo-strike happened, the schools in Detroit closed for a day, and the politicians caved.

“Every time a kid leaves the Detroit system that’s $7,000 walking out the door,”Mr. Kilpatrick told the Detroit News after looking the charter-school gift horse in the mouth. Perhaps Mr. Kilpatrick would like to apologize to the system then for the money the mayor himself has walked out with; Mr. Kilpatrick’s own children attend a charter school in Detroit, according to the Weekly Standard. It’s not hard to see why the mayor would want to escape. The city’s current graduation rate in the traditional public schools is 67.2%. Charter schools in the state have been improving on the state’s MEAP achievement tests far more quickly than traditional public schools.

So, a scorned millionaire in Michigan has had his generous gift turned down by an educational establishment afraid of change and competition. What else could he do with his money? Not that he has asked, but Thos. Bray, who writes “The Heartland,”a celebrated column in the Detroit News and The New York Sun, has suggested Mr. Thompson set up a private scholarship fund, as has been done by philanthropists such as Ted Forstmann and his Children’s Scholarship Fund in New York City and elsewhere.

We would add that New York City’s children are starved for choice. More than 300,000 New York City school children are in failing schools that entitle them to a transfer under the president’s No Child Left Behind law, but they have no successful schools to which to transfer. The city’s Department of Education, under Joel Klein, is in the process of setting up a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization to fund charter schools, so the signs are that Tweed is ready to talk turkey with philanthropists such as Mr. Thompson. The gift he offered Michigan dwarfs the generous gift Wm. Gates gave for schools in New York. It may not be Michigan, but the children here would be just as grateful to the retired asphalt magnate or any other philanthropist tired of watching children languish in a monopoly school system.