“The State need only ascertain the actual cost of providing a sound basic education in New York City.”

— From the “Remedy” section of the New York State Court of Appeals decision in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. The State of New York

That is the homework assigned to Governor Pataki by the New York State Court of Appeals in the celebrated case regarding fiscal equity among schools. It certainly declared that the governor and legislature are failing to ensure New York City’s 1.1 million pupils a “sound basic education.” But the assignment — at least the first assignment — is to find out what it costs to provide a sound basic education. And as Mr. Pataki has shown with the appointment of his new education commission, that question might not produce the answer for which the plaintiffs in this case and all the other liberal agitators are hoping.

For while the assumption among the usual suspects is that this decision will force Albany to send more education money downstate, nowhere in the court’s order can one find the requirement to go with the highest bidder. It seems to us, instead, that this decision provides nothing so much as an opportunity to take an expansive view of just how efficiently, or rather inefficiently, New York City is spending its education dollars. After all, one could hardly ask a consumer to “ascertain the actual cost of providing a sound basic automobile”without him or her taking a look through the classifieds.

Mr. Pataki, who has a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers of the state, seems in no mood simply to cough up more money. He may even have some comparison shopping in mind; at least five of the 16 members he appointed to his Commission on Education Reform last week are sympathetic to the idea of school vouchers. Those who have followed the voucher debate, especially those familiar with the city’s Catholic school system, know how much less expensive and more effective these options can be than the public school monopoly held by the Tweed Trust. As a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of New York, Nora Murphy, laid out for The New York 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. The price tag easily beats the city’s public schools, where there is an education budget of more than $11,300 per enrolled student — but little soundness, since two-thirds of eighthgraders can’t pass a state math test.

So, which of these numbers is the “actual cost of providing a sound basic education in New York City”? The monopoly system here spends not much less than the schools in Greenwich, Conn. — where there is a budget of $13,000 a student — and so far can’t get the “sound basic”stamp of approval. Is it a prudent bet that another $1,700 would make the difference in the Big Apple? As education expert Sol Stern, author of “Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice,” told the Sun, there is a difference between low productivity and not having enough money. The question is,”What kind of bang are you getting for your buck?” The Catholic system administers about 110,000 students with a total central administrative staff of 28. At that level, the city’s school system would have a few hundred administrative staff; instead, it has 9,000 assorted bureaucrats. Charter schools, for their part, do the job on roughly two-thirds the budget of public schools, with no funds coming from the state for school construction, to boot.

And, of course, these schools aren’t just cheap — they work. The SAT scores of New York’s Catholic school students are on average more than 100 points higher than those of New York public school students, as Mr. Stern points out in his book. Charter schools consistently create remarkable gains on state tests for the disadvantaged students who take advantage of them. That’s the kind of bang New York could harness if only it would unleash the power of educational choice. Mr. Pataki still has nine open slots on the commission he has set up to identify what it costs to provide a sound basic edcucation. What he needs is commonsense individuals who know how to shop around.