In his weekly radio address on Friday, Mayor Bloomberg blamed the overcrowding problem in some city schools on choice, specifically the new federal No Child Left Behind law. “What the federal law says is that if you are in a failing school, you have the right to demand that your child goes to a good school,” the mayor said. “There aren’t any seats in the good schools. Those are full already anyway.” The mayor hits on a real problem here, but he gets it exactly backward. The problem isn’t that the federal law is trying to give children more choice, the problem is that, working within the traditional public school system, there isn’t much from which to choose.

“I just don’t see how you can blame No Child Left Behind for overcrowding,” the councilwoman for the Upper East Side and chair of the City Council’s education committee, Eva Moskowitz, told The New York Sun over the weekend. Overcrowding, she points out, existed well before the federal law. Furthermore, “The number of people who are able to access choice is such a tiny percentage.” She’s got that right. Out of the 300,000 children in low-performing city public schools, only about 8,000 were granted transfers for this school year — that’s less than 3% of those who were eligible. And it’s only 0.6% of the 1.2 million children in New York City’s public school system. Ms. Moskowitz, among others, has charged that the Department of Education wasn’t doing enough to alert parents to their choices under federal law. One private group even filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of parents who hadn’t been notified properly.

It’s not as if the demand for choice doesn’t exist in New York City. When private philanthropists offered 7,500 scholarships here to New York City private and parochial schools in 1999, applications were filed for nearly 170,000 students. That’s about 15% of the public school population. Of course, these students were being offered an escape from the failing system into schools proven to perform. Even under the most rigorous enforcement of No Child Left Behind, parents only are being offered a ticket to another public school — often one far away and overcrowded, or nearby and not much better than the failing school their children are already attending.

Such is the fatal flaw of the president’s education reform, that it cannot will into being more high-performing schools. But to take from that the lesson that choice leads to overcrowding misses the point. Doubtless, the United Federation of Teachers, in pushing the point publicly and vowing to file thousands of grievances, thinks it can force more taxpayers’ funds into the school system and its own pockets. The real lesson is that children effectively have no choice if we limit them to the existing public monopoly under the control of the Tweed Trust. Mr. Bloomberg prefers to cast blame. The Bush administration, in contrast, offers at least the hope that school districts will take this lesson to heart and begin exploring better ways of offering students choice — through charter schools and vouchers.