The chairwoman of the City Council’s education committee, Eva Moskowitz, deserves enormous credit for convening hearings to shed light on the contracts — custodians’, principals’,and teachers’ — that govern our public schools. Her hearings have electrified a debate that is already superheated as the mayor and the chancellor enter negotiations on yet another contract that could, if the mayor and chancellor lose, doom the hopes for reform for yet another contract cycle. All this was underscored by the chancellor’s testimony yesterday.

Even while those hearings were under way, an even more important element of the debate was being aired in Washington, where the First National Commission on Choice in K–12 Education released yesterday the results of two years of research on what works and what doesn’t in school choice.

The commission is housed and staffed at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy. In a report titled, “School Choice: Doing It the Right Way Makes a Difference,” the group of school-choice supporters and skeptics arrive at common ground. “The discussion about ‘choice’ today is as much about ‘how’ and ‘how much’ as it is about ‘whether,'” the centrist group writes. “Communities can decide whether to make expansion of choice a conscious strategy, or they can let choice happen to them.”

Its recommendations, while couched in conciliatory language, boil down to one basic point: If you’re going to try choice, truly try choice.

This means that states and localities will be better off if they avoid the pitfalls in which places like New York have gotten mired. While New York state has a law allowing for charter schools, it funds them well below the level of traditional public schools and also denies them public funds for building costs. “Such decisions have consequences,”the report says.”It…penalizes students whose parents choose new options, implying that a parent’s choice reduces the community’s responsibility.”

The mayor and Mr. Klein have been doing a heroic job of late on the charter school front. The Center for Charter Excellence, a not-for-profit Mr. Klein has set up with the goal of opening 50 new charter schools in the city over the next five years, is an important start. If he convinces the Legislature to increase the number of new charter schools that are allowed in the state, that will represent even further progress. The final step would be to secure funding for charter schools equal to that of traditional public schools.

This has implications for the current labor showdown. There could be nothing like the prospect of thousands of students fleeing the monopoly system to make the United Federation of Teachers re-evaluate just how wedded it is to the work rules we’ve heard so much about over the last week. It’s something that Ms. Moskowitz’s sunlight can’t accomplish alone.