The rejection by Alabama voters Tuesday of a $1.2 billion tax hike proposed by that state’s Republican governor, Robert Riley, offers New Yorkers much to think about. Supporters of the tax increase said it was needed to improve the state’s education rankings, which are toward the bottom across the board. Voters were smarter than that, spurning the proposal — which would have boosted income and property taxes on the middle and upper classes — by a margin of 68% to 32%. The conventional wisdom, it seems, may be shifting.

Some tried to paint the special election on the tax hike as a race issue, with low-income blacks standing to fare the best if the tax increases were pushed through. But the state’s black political leaders only entered the fray late, when the governor began twisting their arms on unrelated legislation. Polling in the state, conducted late last week by Larry Powell at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, found that low-income voters opposed the largest tax increase in Alabama history by a 2-to-1 margin. Blacks opposed the measure 39% to 37%, with fewer than a quarter of black voters undecided.

How could voters oppose raising taxes to help schools? Partially, Alabamans have a proper skepticism of their government. “If the money they have now was spent wisely, we wouldn’t need this,” a 74-year-old retired state employee from Montgomery, Adie Ward, told the Associated Press. Furthermore, as these columns have noted often, there is no reason to assume a direct correlation between education spending and education quality. Alabama ranks 45 out of 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) in per pupil spending, at $5,845, ac cording to numbers compiled by the Education Intelligence Agency. The state ranked 48, Idaho, which spends $5,616 a pupil, tied New York State in the 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress in Writing. Yet New York State ranks first in per pupil spending, pouring a whopping $10,922 on average into the education of every public school student.

New York City spends even more than the state on average — about $11,300 a pupil. And it gets awful results: Two-thirds of the city’s eighth-graders can’t pass a state math test. At the same time, charter schools have shown them selves able to boost the scores of poor children on roughly two-thirds the budget of a traditional public school and without any money from the government to build their facilities. The city’s Catholic schools spend about $3,200 a pupil for kindergarten through eight grade, and they spend about $5,800 a pupil for high schoolers. Catholic school SAT scores are more than 100 points higher than public school scores in the city.

Congratulations are due Alabamans for their grit in keeping hold of their hard earned money. There’s a lesson here for New York, as Governor Pataki’s Commission on Education Reform goes about the business of ascertaining the actual cost of a “sound basic education” in New York City. The state’s highest court, and the liberals who brought the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit that forced the governor to create the commission, are hoping to make Albany send more money downstate. That money, it has to be assumed, would come from a tax hike. Alabama suggests that this is not a situation in which it would be prudent for the politicians to take the voters for granted.