In the midst of a schools crisis as deep as the one that confronts New York it would seem to us that the last item the mayor would want to cut would be seed money for an experimental program designed to underwrite new approaches. But that’s what the mayor has done by eliminating from the city budget $10 million intended for the Charter School Improvement Fund created in 2000 by Mayor Giuliani. The chairwoman of the City Council’s education committee, Eva Moskowitz, tells our Rachel Kovner that she is trying to get the funds restored, but that the struggle is a lone battle. “Don’t hold your breath,” she says.

There are a lot of people in this town prepared to try, however, because this cut would not just be pound foolish, but penny foolish as well. No one is saying the education budget is sacrosanct, per se. But if the Mayor wants cuts, he shouldn’t have trouble finding targets of opportunity. According to a Manhattan Institute Civic Bulletin from last year, only 55% of city education spending goes to instruction. The rest goes to bureaucracy, support services, and as an Institute senior fellow, Sol Stern, puts it, “teachers who hardly teach at all.”

This is a school system where only 50% of students finish high school within four years. Only about 35% of students take the SAT, fewer than half the rate of the 73% who take the test statewide. Only 41% of the city’s elementary school pupils score at an acceptable level in reading, and only 33% perform at an acceptable level in math. This is not a situation where one can afford to cut one of the only programs that aims to facilitate trying something new.

New York state passed its charter school law only in 1998, and already 21 schools in the five boroughs have been granted charters. More new schools are in the pipeline, but these upstarts now risk having the funds pulled out from under them a a time when the track record of charter school experiments around the country is showing real promise. Academic improvements almost invariably become manifest for charter school students after a few years, and far and away minority students have been shown to benefit the most. The best defense the teachers’ unions have been able to mount is to call the academic improvements insignificant and to argue that charter schools and other forms of school choice could hurt students left behind in traditional public schools.

The mayor is responding to the concerns of charter advocates by saying that the Board of Education has managed to crush the charter school movement, anyway. No doubt, it is doing its best, and we wish the mayor nothing but success in his effort to gain mayoral control of public school governance. But the best way for the mayor to make the case for control would be to show parents and students successful alternatives. If the mayor follows through with his plan to eliminate this money, some voters and parents might start to have second thoughts about the wisdom of giving him control of the entire system.