A court-appointed panel yesterday swung behind the notion that the problem with the public schools in New York City is a lack of money, calling for the state to pitch in another $5.63 billion a year to New York City’s public school system, which is already spending more than $12 billion a year. The panel had been convened in the lawsuit brought by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. Yet even before the court-appointed special masters came out with their finding, usually sober voices such as the Citizens Budget Commission were scurrying to suggest ways to raise taxes.

Fortunately for New York’s already hard-pressed taxpayers, there’s a view of the situation other than the one expressed in the “more money” litigation that is coming to a head. New York already spends more on its schools than any other state. For all that spending, it achieves unsatisfactory results. It turns out that some of the problems that the school system faces are not financial ones, but legal and structural ones.

This was brought into relief this week by a legal-reform organization called Common Good, which issued a report called “Over Ruled: The Burden of Law on America’s Public Schools.” Pages One and Three of yesterday’s New York Sun featured a flow-chart from the report illuminating in unforgettable detail how difficult it is for a principal in a New York City public school to suspend a disruptive student.

Firing a teacher is similarly difficult. The process involves 83 different steps and legal considerations, which can occupy even the most resolute principal for more than a year. Even initiating the process – by placing a note in the teacher’s file – requires our hapless educator to go through 32 initial steps. New York City’s teachers become eligible for tenure after three years of service, and automatically receive it after five. Which means teachers can only be fired for incompetence and professional misconduct.

Common Good has produced a handy guide to completing the complex legal steps required to accomplish simple tasks at the city’s public schools. The organization’s study collects all the laws and regulations governing a typical public high school in New York. It includes the procedures that administrators must follow when they want to hire a new teacher (38 steps), or replace a dysfunctional heating system (99 steps, which can take months to complete).

“The burden of law on schools has become staggering,” said the chairman of Common Good, Philip Howard. “If teachers and principals are forced to spend their time working through these arduous procedures, how will they have the energy, enthusiasm, and time to educate?”

We doubt that any educator has actually read all the laws and regulations that govern New York’s schools: 846 pages of the state education law, 720 pages of regulations issued by the state commissioner, 15,062 formal decisions – contained in 43 volumes – by the New York State Commissioner of Education. Not to mention federal laws and the various relevant collective-bargaining agreements and consent decrees.

Says Mr. Howard, “Educating our children – not compliance – should be the top priority for teachers. We should let the administrators and teachers use their judgment and then hold them accountable for their performance.”

As the Legislature grapples with meeting state Supreme Court Justice Leland DeGrasse’s mandate to provide students with the sound, basic education guaranteed by the state constitution, it can raise taxes and spend more money. Or it can revisit some of the rules that are strangling schools in the state, and, with charter schools and vouchers, increase the number of schools operating outside this system of rules.

In the meantime, the decision of the court-appointed panel to swing behind the spending approach is but the next step in a fight that pits Governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Klein, Randi Weingarten, Judge DeGrasse, Speaker Silver, Senator Bruno, and even Councilwoman Moskowitz against the taxpayers of New York City and state – and against the parents and their children, who, unless they’re rich, have no choice in respect of where they go to school.

It seems clear that in the short run the current crop of politicians in Albany and New York will choose the tax-and-spend route. Ms. Moskowitz put out a fawning statement yesterday in support of the spending binge the court panel has proposed. “Anyone who balks at this figure need only to look at successful suburban school districts or private schools,” she said. But as it is, New York City spends more for each student than many successful suburban schools elsewhere in the country and, as the Council member is well aware, about twice what the city’s Catholic schools spend.

This is a situation that begs for a politician to emerge as a genuine reform candidate on education with a platform of choice for parents and tax cuts for taxpayers. The people of New York City are already the most heavily taxed in the entire country of America, from the farthest reaches of the Bering Strait to the last condo in the Florida Keys. And all that Messrs. Pataki, Bloomberg, Klein, De-Grasse, Silver, and Bruno and Mmes. Weingarten and Moskowitz have come up with is a plan that will guarantee these same taxpayers will have to pony up billions more for schools they still do not want to use. In the long run, the voters in New York are savvy enough that they will grasp all this and react accordingly.