The New York City schools chancellor, Joel Klein, has put the field-trip policy for the city schools on, well, a roller-coaster.

The existing policy, Regulation A-670, states, “Occasionally trips are scheduled as part of the celebratory and ceremonial activities that accompany articulation from one level to another….This type of activity may include trips to resorts, amusement parks, recreation areas and other places.” The regulation also states that “School trips should be viewed as an extension of the learning environment.” Another provision in the regulation says, “Schools may sponsor trips before, during or after school hours, on week-ends or nonschool days.” Currently, amusement park trips are allowed during the school day.

Word had gotten out that Mr. Klein was considering banning school trips to amusement parks. That might not be a bad idea. Given that plenty of New York public school pupils can’t read or do math, sending them off to learn the higher points of Newtonian mechanics at Six Flags Great Adventure might be getting a bit ahead of the game.

But there was a hue and a cry from the pro-amusement park camp. A spokesman for the department now tells The New York Sun that, “There will be further discussion on the policy.”

The New York Post’s piece on the policy flap quotes Great Adventure, the New Jersey theme park, as saying that they have hundreds of groups from New York City schools visit their park every year. Rye Playland, an amusement park in Westchester, likewise told The New York Sun that it gets hundreds of groups from metroarea schools every year.

The chairwoman of the City Council’s education committee, Council Member Eva Moskowitz, cautioned against “unnecessarily puritanical” regulations, a point we wished she had remembered when it came to the vote on smoking in bars. “Recreation needs to be encouraged,” she said, arguing that city children shouldn’t be deprived of fun field trips that suburban schoolchildren enjoy.

The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, also emphasized the importance of field trips as socializing experiences. “Anyone who has been a parent or a school teacher understands the essential value of these kinds of trips,” Ms. Weingarten told us, warning against a school system of “reading and math machines” where “nothing else gets done but reading, testing for reading, math, testing for math.” She reminded that in 1998 Mayor Giuliani encouraged students to take the day off to attend a celebratory parade for the Yankees.

One can agree that field trips are important socializing experiences while also believing that trips to amusement parks and resorts, especially during school hours, are not a good way for the city’s students, who are already well behind their counterparts in other parts of the state and nation, to be spending their time.

But the idea of Chancellor Klein trying to set this policy for a million students and a thousand schools in one fell swoop strikes us as of a piece with plans to impose a centralized command and control structure on the city’s schools. Maybe one school with a particularly gifted physics teacher can make amusement park rides a great educational tool. Maybe one principal whose school performs extremely well should be able to reward its students, or certain top-performing students, with a fun field trip. If the policy is under further discussion, one thing worth discussing would be putting the field-trip policies under the control of individual teachers and schools, and allowing parents to choose between different approaches.