So it turns out that the tax credit for parents of private or parochial school students, introduced last year in Albany by Senator Martin Golden at $1,500 a student, then proposed by Governor Pataki at $500 a student, is being slashed by Speaker Sheldon Silver to a mere $400 a student. On top of that, the speaker – according to our Jacob Gershman’s dispatch from Albany in Monday’s paper – wants to extract from the parochial schools a promise that they won’t raise tuition to eat up the tax credit. And on top of that, as part of a compromise to pass the $400 million tax credit program, the state legislature is going to fund through bonds $1.8 billion in capital projects, including new school buildings, for the New York City public schools.

This isn’t a compromise, it’s an insult, and rather than taking the $400 and declaring victory, the Catholic and Jewish leaders who have been pushing this issue in Albany would be wise to walk away from the bargaining table there and spend some more time explaining matters to the electorate. Private school tuitions in New York City are crowding the $30,000 a year mark. Offering a parent a $400 tax credit on that is tantamount to going out to a $200 dinner and then leaving the waiter a five-cent tip. The waiter would be justified in throwing the nickel back in the customer’s face. In this case, it’s even more outrageous an insult, because the private school parents’ taxes are already being used to subsidize schools their children don’t use. It’s as if the waiter’s wages were being garnished to pay for the entire $200 dinner he didn’t eat – and then the five cent tip were reduced to four cents, then offered as some kind of concession conditioned on the “compromise” provision that in exchange for the four cent tip, the waiter’s wages would be garnished by another ten cents to pay for a new restaurant he wouldn’t be eating in. And on top of that, the waiter had to agree that his salary wouldn’t be increased for a year.

The promise not to raise tuition is among the most galling demands. Mr. Silver has never met a unionized public employee he doesn’t want to give a raise to or a Manhattan hospital he doesn’t want to increase the subsidy for. Now private and parochial schools are supposed to somehow accommodate their increasing health insurance premiums and pay their teachers competitive salaries without increasing tuition? The tuition increases are the result in part of the mandates that Albany has loaded on the health insurers and wage increases lavished on the unionized hospital workers, as well as the wage increases that politicians have bestowed on the unionized teachers in the government schools, which compete for teaching talent with the private schools.

Here’s a counteroffer for the speaker – the Catholic schools, which now educate high school students at a cost of about $6,000 a student a year, will agree not to raise their tuition past the $18,000 a year that the city’s government-run schools spend. The government-run schools claim that they spend closer to $13,000 a year, but, as Eva Moskowitz pointed out in her tenure as chairwoman of the city council’s education committee, that dramatically understates spending by failing to account fully for things like capital expenditures and subsidies to the schools from other city departments such as the police, health, and cultural affairs departments.

The logical move here is to give the parents not a measly $400 but the full $18,000 and let the parents allocate the full sum to whatever school the parents think is best to educate their child. There’s no reason to limit it to poor parents or parents in failing school districts. One of the fundamental points to bear in mind here is that this money is not the government’s money. This money is the taxpayer’s money to begin with. It only gets to Sheldon Silver and Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein if it is taken away from the taxpayers by force. People resent this money being taken, and they resent the denial of choice to parents. And they resent insults. A campaign based on that premise has a better chance of long-term success in Albany than one in which every dollar in tax credits for private or parochial school parents is bought by taxing them another $3 for government-run schools that they don’t use.