Few myths are more persistent than the notion that more money itself improves education. The myth surfaced again yesterday, when Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Klein, Council Speaker Quinn, the chairman of the City Council Education Committee, Robert Jackson, and the head of the United Federal of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, gathered to chastise Governor Pataki for not including more money for city schools in his budget proposal. In particular, they claim that the governor’s failure to set aside money to live up to the state’s obligations under the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit will scuttle construction of 21 new schools and block refurbishment of other classrooms, science labs, playgrounds, and other facilities.

It’s impossible to find anyone who thinks the city’s public school buildings are in good repair. A report card for the 2004-05 year prepared by the former chairwoman of the council’s Education Committee, Eva Moskowitz, called the city’s schools “shamefully dilapidated.” The report card found that 7% of school properties, about 80 buildings, showed signs of rodent infestation during the first months of fiscal 2005. The education committee held hearings in which one seventh grade pupil in the New York City public schools actually had to say, “There is no toilet paper or soap … So I carry around hand sanitizer. There are no locks on the doors, so I have to hold the door with my head.”

Only part of the problem is due to a lack of cash, however. Building or refurbishing schools in the city is unreasonably expensive, with costs running to about $325 a square foot in 2005. By way of comparison, developer Larry Silverstein built 1.7 million square feet of modern office space at 7 World Trade Center for about $412 a square foot, including the costs of moving an electricity substation and complicated infrastructure improvements to accommodate such a large structure. By one estimate, the city spends $750,000 on each new science lab it installs.

Many factors inflate school construction costs, ranging from the convoluted process through which architects work with education officials to fine-tune plans for new buildings to work rules governing who can paint what part of a wall (custodians paint the bottom 10 feet of a wall, while painters cover anything above the 10-foot mark). Mayor Bloomberg has taken steps toward solving some of these problems, for example, negotiating with unions so that repairs can be made more cheaply on nights and weekends and during school vacations. Through that and other steps, the mayor has succeeded in reducing building costs from more than $400 a square foot to the current level, even if that current level still seems a bit on the high side.

It strikes us that there’s a lot more in the way of cost-cutting that the mayor could do before going to court against the people of his own city and state, particularly when the people are being ordered around by a highly ideological judge whose entire oeuvre in this case is under appeal. Far better to focus on breaking the city’s monopoly on education and fighting for a system – vouchers or other mechanisms – that would maximize parental choice, permit the schools to disengage from an extraordinarily expensive teachers union contract, and permit a much bigger market in education to flourish in the city.