Liberal activists at the Campaign for Fiscal Equity — the organization that spearheaded the successful lawsuit aimed at forcing Albany to send more school funding to New York City — are setting up a shadow commission to counter Governor Pataki’s Commission on Education Reform. The governor has set up his commission to respond to the Court of Appeals order that the state “ascertain the actual cost of providing a sound basic education in New York City.” Mr. Pataki does not go in assuming that he must deal with the highest bidder, the public school system, and the United Federation of Teachers. He has appointed a number of commission members sympathetic to low-cost, high-yield ideas such as charter schools and school vouchers. This is unacceptable to the CFE crowd, however, since the only answer they want to hear is for the taxpayers to be required to spend more money.

They are joined in this respect by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg, in one of their worst strategic errors on schools to date. They have jumped on board with the lawsuit — and now, it appears, with the Shadow Commission. The CFE’s Sound Basic Education Task Force, as they call it, is not precisely parallel to the governor’s commission. There will not be a set number of appointed members. But Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein got their noses out of joint when the governor failed, at first pass, to award them a spot on his commission. So they seem ready to hitch their wagon to the CFE’s star. According to the deputy director of CFE, Samira Ahmed, the chancellor has been invited to participate, and members of the Department of Education are expected to lend their expertise.

The reason this is a mistake is that the rejectionists at CFE have made it clear that they are open to no solution to New York City’s school problems but more spending. They have done this by denouncing Mr. Pataki’s commission as “politicized”simply because it is likely to explore lower cost options than the UFT. One of the CFE crowd’s chief complaints seems to be that Secretary of State Randy Daniels, a member of Mr. Pataki’s commission, told The New York Sun last week that he intends to promote the idea of providing choice to parents trapped in the public school system, namely through vouchers to help pay for private or parochial school. “I think it’s problematic when you’re proposing answers when you haven’t even posed questions,” Ms. Ahmed told the Sun yesterday.”It’s a distraction from the real task at hand.”

But it’s certainly not as if the question of what is wrong with, and what can be done about, New York City’s public school system is a new one. The CFE’s ideology is that the problem is a lack of money. The group currently has underway a “costing-out study,” for the purpose of answering the Court of Appeals question with a number, that they commissioned late last year. So, they ought not be giving any lectures about entering this process with pre-determined conclusions. They might want to check out a report issued Tuesday by the New York City Independent Budget Office that dissects the tremendous increase in the city’s school spending from 1997 to 2002. Spending rose to $12.5 billion from $8.8 billion, a 42% increase. Out of that, “The largest percentage increase in funding…went to ‘district/superintendency costs,’ which rose 138.2 percent.”This spending splurge produced no commensurate increase in the test scores of New York City’s children during that period.

The CFE claims that its costing-out study will use a “successful schools” approach to determining the “actual cost” of a “sound basic education.” But they won’t look seriously at the schools that are really getting bang for their buck: charter schools and Catholic schools. The New York City public schools spend $11,300 a student so that two-thirds of eighth graders can fail a state math test. The Catholic schools spend an average of $3,200 a pupil from kindergarten through eighth grade and $5,800 for high schoolers, and they have SAT scores an average of 100 points higher than the city’s public school students. This is recounted by education expert Sol Stern in his recent book, “Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.”

It can be argued that the mayor and the chancellor have an interest as bureaucrats to get what money they can for New York City’s schools. But they also represent New York City’s taxpayers and are accountable for providing a better education to our city’s children. Neither of them in good conscience can believe that jacking up the number dictated by the court will serve either of these ends. If they signalled they had anything other than a lust for more tax dollars, they might be able to get on board with the governor’s commission and help look at fundamental reform.