“A dramatic change in the politics of charter schools in New York State” is how the president of the Albany-based Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability, Thos. Carroll, characterized Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement yesterday. The mayor announced that he will seek in Albany greater authority for the chancellor, Joel Klein, to approve charter schools. He’ll also seek a change in the state law that currently limits the number of such schools.

No doubt the move will be scorned in certain quarters in Albany. “The law isn’t going to be changed just to accommodate something the mayor wants” is the reaction our Kath. Lucadamo brought in from Assemblyman Steven Sanders, who represents the teachers union in the legislature and who seems determined to go down in local history as the character who did the most to slow school reform in the city. He says he wants to assess how the first 100 charter schools perform before making decisions about the future.

Well, we sense most New Yorkers will be cheering for the mayor and the chancellor. On the eve of the announcement, the chancellor’s communications director, Peter Kerr, was quoted by the New York Times as saying that the chancellor did not intend the charter school plan as any kind of attack on the union. “Joel absolutely does not intend the charter initiative as an anti-union initiative,” Mr. Kerr was quoyed by the Times as saying. “He feels very strongly the opposite. This is not an anti-union initiative.” The next day, the teachers union boss, Randi Weingarten, was quoted in the Times as saying she’d just love a chance to run one of those charter schools.

Our indefatigable columnist, Andrew Wolf, who has been on this story for months, is reacting (on the adjacent page) cautiously to the move for charters. He reckons the problem is less who owns or operates the schools than the nature of the curriculum and the ability of the teachers to practice their profession. We’re in kind of a “they’re both right” mood. The curriculum fight and the point about teachers autonomy are important but so is the charter movement, and we find the latest developments decidedly encouraging.

It was, after all, only a year or so ago that the mayor and his chancellor seemed to be scorning the idea that charters have a role to play. They accepted it as a factor in reform only grudgingly. The latest development makes one imagine that when Jennifer Lopez put her arms around Mr. Bloomberg as they stood for pictures at City Hall, what she whispered in the mayoral ear was “charters.” In any event, it’s encouraging to think that if the mayor and the chancellor can suddenly become enthusiastic about charters, maybe there’s hope for the really powerful reform, vouchers.

After all, the bottleneck on charters is going to be getting legislative authority to spend government money and gaining charitable contributions, while fending off the unions. Vouchers bypass all of that. Were vouchers to become available, the private sector would be able to add capacity much faster than the government or the charter movement. We understand this isn’t going to happen overnight. But we don’t mind saying that it’s just terrific to see the mayor and the chancellor moving in the right direction.