The decision of the State University of New York’s charter school committee to delay a vote on the teachers union’s application for a school strikes us as a strategic blunder for those of us who would like to see a maximization of parental choice in elementary and secondary education in the state. We see that our friends over at the New York Post want to deny the union a charter, apparently on the theory that the teachers mightn’t run their charter school the way others want to run their charter schools. But the whole point of the charter movement is to ignite some experimentation and different approaches. It seems to us that true advocates of the charter movement would want to open the charters to all comers.

Certainly, we can imagine lots of ways in which admitting the teachers union to the program could end up the waste of a good charter. But we’re not in favor of any limits on charters (see above). True, one advantage of charter schools is the chance to get away from the teachers’ contract. But there are, as we noted in an editorial a year ago, lots of potential benefits to the teachers joining in the experimentation. It wouldn’t be a bad thing, after all, to give the teachers a chance to prove that some of their approach to the education problems are right. That’s a fight in which they’re an underdog, no doubt, but it’s always good to have a point of reference and comparison.

But there’s also the chance that, if a UFT charter is less than a success, it would serve the purpose of making the union a little more understanding of the challenges faced by management in public schools. It will be something, we observed a year ago, to see the grievance procedure. And, we noted when the teachers first disclosed their ambitions for a charter, the idea of a teachers union buying into these reforms signals movement toward a landscape in which parents have a choice on where to send their children to school. The cynics will suggest this is but a bid for the union to take over the whole charter movement; that can’t be a strategy that grows from self confidence.

While we’re all for letting the teachers union proceed with a charter – and doing so today, so they can open in the fall – we don’t have much illusion that charters are the answer to the state’s or the city’s school problems. The real answer, in the view of these columns, is a more radical maximization of parental choice, namely vouchers. Vouchers would be a first step toward giving poor and middle-income families the chance to enjoy the kinds of choice in education that is enjoyed, routinely, by wealthy families in New York. It would allow families, rather than the state or the union, to allocate some of the vast resources that end up in education in the city and state. In the absence of vouchers, more and more people are going to start asking the question that columnist David Gelernter posed in these pages last week, which is whether we really need public education at all.