Looking for some context on the effort by Mayor Bloomberg and his schools chancellor Joel Klein to get control of the New York public schools, we spent the weekend reading, “Battling Corruption in America’s Public Schools,” a new book by an associate professor at John Jay College of the City University of New York, Lydia Segal.

Among the stories the book recounts from New York’s public schools are the custodian who used his school basement to raise chickens for cockfighting, telling inspectors that the hundreds of labeled eggs he was incubating there were to feed students. Another custodian “let his boiler operator store his gun collection near the lunchroom and live in the basement, where he slept, entertained women, and kept a dog,” the book says.

The harshest portraits come from transcripts of undercover investigations of community school board members. “I’m a political leader, that’s why I’m here…. I make sure my people get [expletive] jobs,” one said. Another laughingly admitted, “I’ve never heard the word ‘children’ or ‘education’ enter into our discussions in the last few years… with anybody.” Another board member recounted, “If we recommend somebody,” the district had to hire that person so long as “they’re not illiterate or deformed or something the matter with them.”

This was how the New York public schools were run until Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein came along. And keep in mind that the city’s schools have an operating budget that would rank seventh in the nation if it were a state. The city school system, the book says, has more square footage of real estate than any public agency in the nation save the Defense Department and the Postal Service.

“The tale of public school corruption is one rich in ironies,” Ms. Segal writes. “The lofty idealism that inspired early advocates of public education, for example, contrasts with the opportunism that motivated many to seek jobs in public schools. The optimistic utopianism of reformers to guarantee integrity and efficiency through central school bureaucracies belies the dishonesty and waste these structures actually generated. The ultimate irony is that today conscientious employees sometimes need to break the rules simply to do their jobs well.”

Much of the book is based on the pre-Mayor Bloomberg New York Board of Education and the investigative work done by the late Schools Inspector Edward Stancik. The picture of corruption that emerges is a damning portrait of the permanent government mentality that allowed the selling of community school board seats, the trading of no-show jobs, and unaccountable contracts.

There are, no doubt, academic costs to public school corruption —- community school districts with the highest incidence of corruption ranked lowest in citywide tests, Ms. Segal says. Districts ranking lowest in math and reading scores spent the most per capita on administrators, but the least on teachers. The children were the ones who ended up being cheated.

The book makes it clear that Mr. Bloomberg was correct to insist on mayoral control of the school system and on disbanding community school boards. But the bureaucratic culture of what Ms. Segal terms “creative non-compliance” represents a significant and enduring challenge for the reformers trying to wrestle results and common sense out of the school system.

Mr. Klein is the 13th chancellor in the past 23 years. It is tough to tame the bureaucratic beast, and Ms. Segal offers suggestions, including the appointment of an independent inspector with broad powers, followed by top management determined to remove as much of the dominant coalition and as many abusive work rules as possible. “Otherwise,” Ms. Segal warns, “as with the surgeon who cuts out a tumor but not the surrounding infected tissue, the disease will grow right back.”