President Bush is upping the ante in New York’s education debate today by sending his Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, to join Governor Pataki; a former member of Congress, Floyd Flake; an Orthodox Jewish leader, Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb; the Roman Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn, Nicholas DiMarzio, and Dianne Payne in Queens to discuss “choices in education.” It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic move, given the objections to tuition tax credits the teachers unions have gotten Speaker Silver to raise. Parents in the five boroughs already understand the importance of choice. Waiting lists for slots in the city’s charter schools are miles long, and Ms. Payne herself tried to sue the state to win vouchers. However, the recent shenanigans in Albany surrounding the budget suggest that lawmakers need a remedial class or two.

Mr. Silver managed to outdo himself when he accused private school leaders of wanting to use education tax credits proposed by Mr. Pataki as an excuse to hike tuition. The speaker even tried to extract from private schools a promise not to increase tuition in exchange for his support for a tax credit proposal that was less generous than the governor’s budget proposal and downright miniscule compared to earlier ideas that had been batted around the legislature. We editorialized about the supposed deal on March 8 under the headline, “Some Compromise.” But the matter was thrown into even sharper relief in a wonderful letter sent to the speaker by Bishop DiMarzio, who recounted a February 14 meeting at which he, Cardinal Egan, and leaders of Jewish and independent schools, promised outright not to raise tuition if a tax credit were passed.

This promise apparently didn’t count for anything in the book of a legislator as beholden to teachers’ unions as Mr. Silver. The speaker continued to harp on the tuition-hike theme despite assurances from the two bishops, a level of either distrust or dishonesty at which Bishop DiMarzio takes “personal umbrage.” In the end, the Assembly and Senate agreed to a paltry $330 child tax credit that is nothing short of insulting.

New Yorkers also might well take “umbrage” at Mr. Silver’s double standard in respect of rising tuition. While he believes strongly in the need to constrain tuition at private schools, his convictions evidently don’t extend to public school funding. Witness school spending data released this week by the Census Bureau. New York State spent $12,930 a student in the 2004 school year. That marks a 58% increase from the $8,162 spent in the 1993-94 year. In the same span, tuition at Catholic schools in the Brooklyn diocese increased 100%, to $3,200 from $1,600, and is still less than half the public schools’ cost a decade ago.

The tuition increase in the Catholic schools is attributable to the need to hire more expensive lay teachers to replace retiring priests and nuns and reduced support from poor urban parishes, the director of a diocesan scholarship foundation, Jean O’Shea, told us this week. What’s the public system’s excuse for its outrageous increases to already high spending?

While legislators are perfectly willing to scuttle education reform for “fear” of tuition increases, a legislative pay increase is another matter. Speculation is rife in Albany that the governor is preparing to offer lawmakers a raise in return for lifting the cap on charter schools, as our Jacob Gershman reported yesterday. If true, the deal would be bribery on a grand scale and would send a message – that lawmakers don’t care about poor schoolchildren unless “caring” gives them an opportunity to line their pockets.

Sympathetic though we are to the governor’s desire to lift a cap that’s threatening to strangle a vital education reform, it would be far better to spurn this demand for fealty, even if it meant our children had to stop learning altogether and our legislators scavenge for food. But if legislators aren’t noble enough to support lifting the cap without a pay raise, they don’t deserve the privilege of telling their constituents they voted for such a bill.

New Yorkers have rarely heard a more compelling argument for school vouchers than this year’s budget debate. Left to their own devices, lawmakers in Albany just pour ever greater amounts of taxpayer money into the monopoly public schools, using school spending to shore up support among teachers’ unions while resisting efforts to make it easier for parents to rescue their children from the public school system. The only way to wrest some reform out of this system, it turns out, is for taxpayers to bribe their own lawmakers in exchange for key votes. Boss Tweed couldn’t have come up with such a scheme.