“Charters can stimulate innovation in a system, and create opportunities for choice,” Schools Chancellor Klein told some 300 business leaders at a breakfast meeting last October. “We need to create an environment in which charter schools can be supported and thrive.” Why then is Mr. Klein’s Department of Education paying for a representative at the state level to say, as Barbara Bradley of the New York State School Boards Association did on Tuesday, “We’re opposed to more charter schools…They continue to take money away from public schools where the majority of kids are”?

New York City pays taxpayer-funded dues to the NYSSBA — though neither the association nor the Department of Education could tell The New York Sun the amount of those dues yesterday afternoon, they can be estimated, from the organization’s bylaws posted on its Web site, to be in the neighborhood of $10,000. Mr. Klein even has a seat on its board of directors. One has to wonder what the city is getting for its money and its time.

Aside from combating a proposal that would allow for an expansion of charter schools — publicly funded, privately managed institutions that create at least a modicum of choice for children in decrepit public schools — the NYSSBA seems mostly to be a hat-in-hand lobbying group. It lobbied for a restoration of every dollar Governor Pataki tried to cut to close the state’s budget gap. The organization has also supported legal action to give the courts control over the state’s education funding formula. While supporters of that suit, such as Mayor Bloomberg, believe it would bring more education money to the city, it looks to us like an attempt to use the courts to snatch power away from the Legislature, an idea that in the long run will do nothing to save the city’s failing schools.

Perhaps the dues could be justified by the services the association provides. Ms. Bradley describes these as, “information, advocacy, and leadership development services.” Given the information available on the organization’s Web site — a mix of how-to-be-a-better-school-board-member material and anti-charter-school studies — we’d say that justification is a loser as well.

Instead, it looks like just one more example of the conflicts of interest manifest in the Tweed Trust. The City of New York pays money to support and belong to an organization of local school boards — notoriously bastions of teachers-union influence — that then goes on to lobby directly against the policy of the city’s schools chancellor. All the while, New York’s taxpayers foot the bill to play both sides of the issue. The expenditure may not be the largest, but the city has no reason to pay for a bunch of two-bit liberal lobbyists to sit in Latham and contradict it. The chancellor and the mayor — the ones we pay to lobby for New York City’s children — can speak for themselves.