There’s a public school in Harlem that is so popular that there is a waiting list to get into every grade. The city’s charities have put $3 million into the school’s building. The organization that runs it is headed by a 37-year-old Princeton graduate who helped to found Teach for America, a nationally renowned program that recruits and trains young teachers for schools that need them. The school day begins at 8 a.m. and ends at 4 p.m., meaning students get 35% more time in class than they would in an ordinary school. The latest round of English test scores show that most of the school’s fourth-graders scored better than or equal to the fourth-graders at other schools in the district, leading the chairwoman of the City Council’s education committee, Eva Moskowitz, to describe the school as “outperforming” its peers.

So what has the state education bureaucracy done to this place of learning, the John A. Reisenbach Charter School? It decided to shut it down, egged on by political conservatives who mistakenly put “accountability” ahead of choice when it comes to education policy. The New York Post, in an editorial last month, called Reisenbach “rotten to the core,” and “scandalously under-performing.” That was before the new test scores showing the school’s fourth-graders doing better than other schools in the neighborhood. The director of the Charter Schools Institute at the State University of New York, James Merriman, was quoted in February by this newspaper as saying, “It is unlikely in our professional judgment that there will be a significant increase in those scores.” The SUNY board voted in February to close the school by refusing to renew its charter. Yet the school management says the latest test results do show a significant improvement.

The president and founder of the organization that manages the school, Daniel Oscar of the Learning Project, says he understands there’s now some interest from the SUNY board in reviewing its decision to close the school. Ms. Moskowitz suggests giving the school another two years to prove itself. Mr. Oscar and Ms. Moskowitz both concede the school’s achievement levels still have room for improvement.

If the SUNY board won’t reverse itself and set things right, the state Board of Regents or the New York City Department of Education could step in and grant Reisenbach a charter. The city schools chancellor, Joel Klein, yesterday — to his great credit — announced eight new charter schools to open in the city in September, including an all-male school, the Excellence Charter School of Bedford Stuyvesant. Terrific, so far as it goes. But there’s no reason the opening of new schools should come alongside the neglect or punishment of a pioneer charter school that slogged it out in the difficult years before the city schools leadership became supportive of charters.

The eighth-grade test scores that the school’s critics have cited come from students who had some of their formative educational experiences in other schools. Reisenbach, which opened its doors in September 1999, is but five years old.

The parents — overwhelmingly blacks and Hispanics who live in Harlem — wanting to send their children to this school seem to be able to discount for these issues.

“I find these parents very sophisticated consumers,” Ms. Moskowitz tells us. We don’t mind saying that they certainly seem more sophisticated about their own children’s education than are the New York Post editors or Governor Pataki’s appointees to the SUNY board.