When Governor Pataki set up his Commission on Education Reform earlier this month — to respond to this summer’s court decision directing the state to come up with a number for what it costs to provide a “sound basic education” in New York City — Mayor Bloomberg and the Assembly’s speaker, Sheldon Silver, let out a great cry. The governor had excluded them, they felt, and he was just using the commission as a delaying tactic. We took a different view. Mr. Pataki, rather than delaying, was seizing the lead in a debate over just why New York City must deal with the highest bidder, the public school system, in purchasing education for the city’s children. Why not, instead, experiment with ideas that have been proven to cost less and get better results: charter schools and vouchers?

Mr. Pataki’s commission is now sprinting ahead. For one of its members, New York Secretary of State Randy Daniels, has declared, as our Wm. F. Hammond reports at Page 1 of today’s New York Sun, that he plans to put school choice and an expansion of charter schools on the table. “I want to see vouchers,” Mr. Daniels told the Sun.”I think we need to expand competition as much as possible because that is the only way we are going to get meaningful, sustainable reform.”In that vein, he also said that he wants to see the cap on the number of charter schools in the state lifted. Under current law the state can only grant 100 charters, and 51 have already been used up.”I believe that charters and vouchers and every available tool we can give a parent to educate their kid, we should provide that,” Mr. Daniels said.

Such rhetoric from the governor’s commission might be perceived as coming from right field in the minds of those who want to continue the status quo, albeit aided by a few billion more dollars a year, courtesy of state taxpayers. But these columns noted at the time the governor set up his commission that at least five of the 16 members were supportive of vouchers. Those were: well-known voucher proponent Reverend Floyd Flake; the chairman of Mr. Bloomberg’s Charter Revision Commission and former New York City schools chancellor, Frank Macchiarola; the former president of the New York City Board of Education, Ninfa Segarra; the president of the Public Policy Institute of New York, David Shaffer, and Mr. Daniels. We now can add to that list the bishop of Buffalo, Henry Mansell. That brings the total up to six commissioners sympathetic to the principle of choice for parents who can’t afford private school and who are trapped in a failing public school system. The commission’s chairman, Frank Zarb, a former chairman of Nasdaq, says he has an open mind.

We hope he and one or two other members of the commission truly do. If so, they may begin to discern the opportunity the state’s Court of Appeals has opened. “The State need only ascertain the actual cost of a sound basic education in New York City,” the court wrote. No doubt the expectation of the plaintiffs was that the state would have to return a number higher than the $11,300 per enrolled student that the city spends on its public schools. But dealing only with the public system is like asking someone to tell you what a sound, basic automobile costs without allowing them to scan the classifieds; and if the commission were to listen to the likes of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the liberal group that brought the lawsuit, it would be like walking into the dealership and letting the salesman name the price.

Instead, if they’re willing to shop around, the commissioners might kick the tires of the Catholic school system in New York City. As a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of New York, Nora Murphy, laid out for the Sun in December, New York’s Catholic schools spend an average of $3,200 a pupil for kindergarten through eighth grade, and they spend an average of $5,800 a pupil for high schoolers. Their schools are famous for the soundness of their basic education and for their lack of bureaucracy. Similarly, the KIPP Academy charter school in the South Bronx, that borough’s highest-performing middle school, gets by with two-thirds the budget of a traditional public school. It raises some private funds, but still spends about $1,000 less on every student than the regular public schools. Mr. Daniels and at least five of his friends on Mr. Pataki’s commission comprehend this. With Mr. Daniels pushing the issue, we can all hope that the majority will see it by the time the commission reports on March 1, 2004.