While the teachers’ contract has been dominating the headlines on the education beat, the story that excites our interest is Mayor Bloomberg’s bid to lift the cap on charter schools. The chancellor, Joel Klein, has nursed this cause for several years now, often when he was a relatively lonely, even courageous voice on the issue. And the emphasis the mayor has just thrown on the point suggests he recognizes that along with mayoral control of the schools, charters could well emerge as the most important legacy of his first term.

The mayor didn’t so much announce his goals as throw down the gauntlet at opponents of education reform in Albany. “Unless the state removes the cap and ensures that the mayor has the independent authority to create new charter schools in New York City, we will have reached a dead end, “the mayor was quoted by our Julia Levy as stating on Monday. “Let’s be clear: Leaving the cap and the current state approval process in place is no more acceptable than leaving in place the old Board of Education bureaucracy, or social promotion, or the policies that prevented principals from being the leaders in their schools.”

For this reform to succeed the mayor needs to be given the authority to grant charters on his own. Right now, groups wishing to open new charter schools can apply either to their local school districts or to the State University of New York, but in every case the Board of Regents has the final say. This is a recipe for stagnation, since it means that a single state authority still has monopoly control of schools that are designed to break the state’s monopoly control of education.

Having a single “authorizing authority” puts New York in line with most of the 40 states and the District of Columbia that allow charter schools. But nine of those states have already started allowing multiple agencies to charter schools, and reformers view this as a growing trend. States that allow more than one entity to authorize new charters have discovered that doing so can dramatically improve the quality of those schools – and speed the granting of charters.

The District of Columbia is a case in point. The district’s charter law allows two groups to authorize new schools: the city’s traditional Board of Education and a new D.C. Public Charter School Board. According to a recent study by the Progressive Policy Institute, the PCSB’s charter schools perform better than the Board of Education’s. For the most recent school year, about 42% of students in schools chartered by the Board of Education were proficient in math, compared to 59% in schools chartered by the PCSB. In reading, 43% of students in Board of Education charter schools were proficient, compared to 46% of students in PCSB-chartered schools.

The institute’s report suggests that the PCSB is better at attracting quality charter applicants because it is more transparent and simply more interested in charters. The PCSB’s sole function is to supervise charter schools, while the city’s Board of Education must also supervise one of the most problem-riddled public school systems in the country. That is a key point to remember in New York – having an authorizing entity that’s committed to charter schools makes an enormous difference.

While the Board of Regents might not be completely uninterested in charter schools, the Bloomberg-Klein team has exhibited something very much needed – genuine excitement about charters and a willingness to make charters a cornerstone of its efforts to reform the city’s schools. Allowing the mayor and chancellor to charter schools in the city would give educational innovators in the five boroughs an opportunity to work with administrators who care passionately about their projects.

It would offer another advantage, as well. As local authorities, they are in a position to know better than even the best state board where charter schools can do the most good and which groups are best qualified to run them. They can move with greater speed. Such a local advantage has spurred the growth of charter schools in Indianapolis, the only city in the country where the mayor himself is a chartering entity, according to that city’s director of charter schools, David Harris.

The jurisdictions that allow multiple authorizing authorities have discovered that the system can have many practical benefits for the schools themselves. The chairman of Washington’s PCSB, Thomas Nida, notes that new charter schools generally have an easier time raising start-up capital if they are chartered by a strong authority because that builds public confidence. Competition among chartering entities increases the chances that a school will find such a strong authority.

All of these factors argue strongly in favor of allowing the mayor and the chancellor to bypass the Board of Regents to authorize charter schools. The charter schools themselves are popular among city parents. The seriousness with which Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein take standards and education reform more broadly suggest they have more than earned the right to take charge of expanding the reach of charter schools in the five boroughs.

These columns have long been invested in the idea of vouchers as the most efficient way to extend to parents choice in the education of their children. But we don’t mind saying that we’re with the mayor and chancellor completely on their quest for charter authority. They have made some mis-steps in the first term, but their achievement on education will so far, in and of itself, inspire many to vote to give the mayor a second term. It’s hard to think of a better issue on which to start out a second term, if they win it, than lifting the state’s arbitrary cap on the number of charters and granting them the authority to extend the enormous gains they have made for our children.