The announcement yesterday that the Bronx Charter School for the Arts has found a new facility, which will be developed in a public-private partnership, is yet another reminder of the progress that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is making in bringing more choice to parents and children in New York City. The charter school, which opened earlier this year, is “already demonstrating innovation in teaching and learning,” the chancellor said yesterday. It wouldn’t even be off the ground if Mr. Klein’s hadn’t found temporary space at I.S. 216/217 for it to open with 160 students.

The announcement marked the first time that a public-private partnership will support the development of a new facility for a charter school in New York City. Such partnering is the central principle behind the nonprofit that the chancellor has created to help house innovation in education, the New York City Center for Charter Excellence. The center, which is still in the process of forming, has already won $40 million in financial commitments. Mr. Klein has stated that it is his goal to help establish 50 new charter schools in New York City over the next five years. To meet his goal, however, Mr. Klein will have to do battle with the Legislature.

Albany’s solons, as always cowering in fear of the teachers unions, have never been enthusiastic supporters of the charter school movement. That’s why Mr. Klein needed to set up a charter school center in the first place. When Albany approved charter schools in 1998, it made sure the schools would be handicapped by receiving a lower per-pupil allotment of funds from the government than traditional public schools, and it also made sure that the schools would not get money to build or rent new facilities. And that was just the beginning of how the unions convinced Albany to tame the charter threat.

The kicker was that the number of new charter schools that could be established in the state was capped at 100 statewide. This means that even if Mr. Klein could secure private-sector funding to house all 50 of the charter schools he hopes to build, he could run up against state law. The unions were hardly looking to allow the groundwork to be laid for an education revolution back in 1998 — they wanted to keep things down to an easy-to-quell uprising. Unfortunately for the unions, however, parents have taken quite a liking to the idea of choice, and even the state’s Board of Regents, effectively appointed by the Democratic Assembly majority, has had to admit in a recent report that charter schools have shown pretty good results in five years.

The next step for Mr. Klein is to lobby for a proposal that the Board of Regents had been prepared to make to the Legislature, but which it withdrew last week under heavy pressure from the teachers unions. The proposal was to exclude district-approved charter schools — those approved by Mr. Klein and local school boards around the state — from the 100-school cap. The logic is that if a local district wants to experiment with a large number of charter schools, the state has no reason to intervene. The idea would seem to be right up Mr. Klein’s alley. If he’s serious about his 50 new charter schools, this will be at the top of his agenda early next year when he is expected to testify — as New York City’s schools chancellor does every year — before the Legislature.