It was bad enough when the speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, proposed to pay for a reduction in class size in schools by using tax money extracted from ordinary New Yorkers. It was bad enough because there is overwhelming evidence that a reduction in class size is not in and of itself a benefit [“The Class-Size Myth,” May 13, 2005]. But as it turns out, Mr. Miller has found the one thing that would make his “17 Seats” plan even worse: Mr. Miller is using taxpayer money to fund what amounts to a political brochure in support of this program.

As our Jill Gardiner reports this morning, city voters have recently received a glossy, four-color brochure touting the plan. Although “17 Seats” is technically a City Council proposal, Mr. Miller has used the taxpayers’ money to print his own name in letters twice the size of the rest of the text in the first paragraph. Just for good measure, he’s also used taxpayers’ money to print a picture of the speaker reading a book to a rapt group of schoolchildren.

By all appearances “17 Seats” is designed to one-up Mayor Bloomberg’s own class-size reduction program, which would spend $10 million in kindergarten through third grade. Mr. Miller proposes spending even more taxpayer money to hire 2,035 new teachers and reduce class sizes through middle school. In case any voter was confused about the difference between the two plans, Mr. Miller has used their tax money to circulate a brochure that includes language that seems intended to highlight the distinction between him and his political opponent.

Candidates are certainly free to compete with each other when it comes to promising to spend the taxpayers’ money, although many voters would prefer the competition be on tax reductions that would leave the spending money in the hands of the individual taxpayers. But this brochure is another matter. Taking advantage of his position as the speaker of the City Council, Mr. Miller has dipped into council coffers to mail out a thinly veiled piece of campaign literature. We hope the more than 100,000 New Yorkers who got copies enjoyed it – not only did their tax dollars pay for it but also the tax dollars of their neighbors and friends.

And in case they didn’t like this brochure, those voters can look in their mailboxes for three other taxpayer-funded pamphlets touting different parts of Mr. Miller’s plans relating to spending money on senior citizens’ programs and libraries.

This, alas, appears to be legal. The 90-day pre-primary ban on such taxpayer funded mailings from incumbents doesn’t kick in until June 15, and, on its face, this brochure might pass as an effort to inform voters about the City Council’s budgetary priorities. But just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s a good use of funds. It’s one thing for politicians to self-promote on tax rebate checks, as these columns pointed out was done by Mr. Bloomberg and as was also done by President Bush. At least then, it involved a rebate, so the taxpayers come out ahead. It’s another thing to do what Mr. Miller is doing. He is using ordinary taxpayers’ money to use on mailings to them about how he wants to spend more of their money.

And by the way, not only is there no convincing evidence that reducing class sizes does anything more than assuage politically powerful teachers unions, who will certainly welcome the new members, but there is growing evidence that, if anything, reducing class sizes could hurt educational quality. This is what California found when it launched a class-size initiative in the mid-1990s and then had to hire sub-par teachers to stand in front of classrooms.

No ordinary New Yorker would want to spend his or her tax money to mail out this kind of political boilerplate. It has no other purpose than to save Mr. Miller’s campaign from using its own money. It’s not that Mr. Miller couldn’t afford to pay for this mailing out of his own campaign coffers; he had more than $3 million on hand, according to a filing last month. The appropriate thing for him to do at this point would be to use some of those funds to pay back the city for this mailing. If he refuses, it’s just one more good argument against giving him a bigger pile of cash to play with as mayor.