When, back in early 2001, Mayor Giuliani tried to turn over five failing New York City public schools to private management by Edison, the opposition was so strong that the plan was actually defeated. A lot of it was along the lines of one Bronx parent, Kenneth Wilson, who was quoted by the Associated Press: “We hate Edison because they’re going to come in here as a business,” Mr. Wilson said. “Each child is a dollar sign.” The executive board of the United Federation of Teachers passed a resolution expressing concern over for-profit management of public schools that are converted to charter schools. The idea seemed to be that good education was just inherently inconsistent with a profit; any money taken out was seen as funds that could have been spent on students.

Fast forward to this month. A new study was just released that looked at the results, nationwide, of regular public schools, charter schools that were converted from regular public schools, and charter schools run by “educational management organizations” — those usually for-profit education chains like Edison. The result? “EMO-operated charters registered solid gains in test scores from 2000 to 2002, significantly out-gaining non-EMO charter schools with similar demographic profiles,” the study found. “Gains made from 2000 to 2002 have been significantly larger than those of both non-EMO charters and regular public schools,” the study says. “The results presented here are quite positive for EMOs.”

The surprise is not the study’s findings, but the source. The report was issued not by the usual free-market-minded suspects at the Manhattan Institute or the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. No, it came from the center-left Brookings Institution, the establishment Washington think tank that Senator Kerry invoked as his authority in Sunday night’s Democratic presidential debate. The Brookings report, by Tom Loveless, notes, “EMOs are controversial. Many people are hostile to the notions of firms profiting financially from public schools. When charter authorizers consider approving an EMO-operated charter, it often generates intense political opposition.”

The question now is whether that hostility to the notion of a profit is so intense that it overrides the potential likelihood that students would actually improve more in such schools. New York’s current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is a billionaire businessman; we can’t imagine he’s hostile to profits. And Mr. Bloomberg’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, earned his fame as a trustbuster at the Justice Department as a defender of free markets against monopolists. The question now is whether they will follow where the evidence leads and open more New York schools to operation by educational management organizations subject to market discipline. Or whether they will cave to — or become part of — the “intense political opposition.”