The comments of Assemblyman Steven Sanders, head of the Assembly’s education committee, defending a bill that would impede the creation of charter schools, is emblematic of the failure of thought that afflicts so many of this state’s politicians. “School districts can’t afford at this time period to fund more charter schools,” Mr. Sanders said yesterday, as if it were the school districts New Yorkers should be concerned about. It is as if the actual children — the ones the bureaucracy is supposed to serve — are entirely irrelevant.

Mr. Sanders is a Manhattan Democrat who has done what he can to undermine charter schools over the years, pandering to the teachers unions while professing openness to competition. For example, in 2001, he supported a provision in a supposedly generous state charter-school law that requires a majority of parents at a school to vote in favor of its being converted into a charter school — the trick being that any vote not cast is counted as a “no.” Mr. Sanders has also favored measures that make it more difficult to secure money for charter schools, while blam ing lack of funds on city administrators.

Now, using the excuse of a temporarily tight state budget — a budget in which state aid to public schools is still vastly more than it was a decade ago — Mr. Sanders is trying to make it permanently more difficult to expand charter schools. He wants to bar the State Board of Regents and the board of the State University of New York from granting the 48 remaining charters that the state has authorized. The only entities left that would be able to grant charters would be local districts and the city’s Department of Education — basically meaning that none would be granted. The districts are entrenched bureaucracies with an animus toward competition. As our own city’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, may have learned during his tenure overseeing antitrust law at the Justice Department, competition drives down costs, while monopolies can charge exorbitant prices. The right move in the face of financial constraints is to expand competition, not to curtail it. Looks to us like Mr. Sanders could benefit from sitting in on some charter school classes in remedial economics.