This photo of the proprietor of Microsoft walking between the schools chancellor, erstwhile trustbuster Joel Klein, and the chief envoy of private fund-raising for the city’s public schools, Caroline Kennedy, is more than a bit eye-catching. Here, we see the richest man in the world, the very man prosecuted by Mr. Klein for being a monopolist, teaming up with a management that is doing its darnedest to preserve the monopoly of the United Federation of Teachers over the education of our city’s children — even if it means using private money to prop up the Tweed Trust.

That, at least, is the newspaper cynic’s view of Mr. Gates’s gesture in channeling $51.2 million through a variety of foundations to help establish 67 small schools around the city. It’s certainly hard to imagine what this money, a pittance for Mr. Gates, will do, given the fact that the UFT’s president, Randi Weingarten, made nary a peep of protest at his largesse. What a contrast to what happened when the private philanthropists of the Children’s Scholar ship Fund gave away a few thousand privately funded school vouchers to rescue poor children from decrepit public schools. Then Ms. Weingarten hit the roof, declaring: “You have to focus your energy fixing, not abandoning, public schools.”Why was she so mum this week? Because pouring more money into public schools, and indirectly into the UFT’s pockets, is acceptable. So long as the focus stays on helping schools and teachers, as opposed to actual children, the union won’t make a peep.

There’s another way than the cynical, however, to look at Mr. Gates’s gesture. One can imagine this as a first step in a learning process for Mr. Gates. He’ll come to grasp that the small, themed schools are dogs and ponies, shown to parents that the Department of Education hopes to make forget the poor performance of the larger schools they replace. Often, a large school is cut up only to see its smaller successors fail just as spectacularly. Simply because a school is given a fancy name, like the “Harbor School,” and said to focus on maritime culture, doesn’t mean it will do any better than any other public school. “I don’t see any overwhelming evidence that small schools, by themselves, lead to higher academic achievement,” education expert Sol Stern, author of “Breaking Free,” told The New York Sun. Mr. Stern adds that small schools can be inefficient, with more overhead hovering above each student — not a bad deal, whatever the impact on the students, for the UFT.

But there is a model that it would make sense for private philanthropy to get behind in a big way. Charter schools are able to break free from the constraints of the UFT contract, which restricts everything from pay to the length of the school day to which teachers a principal can hire and fire. Charter schools typically institute longer school days and school years, do more preparation work with teachers before school starts, and see great improvements in their test scores. The Sisulu Children’s Academy in Harlem saw 36.8% of its fourth-graders scoring at or above grade level in reading this year as opposed to 21.7% last year. The Charter School of Science and Technology in Rochester has seen a jump in those scores to 37.1% from 16%.

It’s not as if Mr. Gates is unaware of the benefits of charter schools. His Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation released an education policy paper earlier this year recommending that states should “Create policies that make it easier to create charter schools and other new schools.” The report goes on to say: “States should remove existing limits on the number of new charter schools, provide assistance to new schools in obtaining and renovating facilities, assure that states and district per pupil funding is equal to traditional schools at the same grade level, and create incentives to increase the number of charter authorizers and sponsors.”

So spot on are those recommendations that it makes people wonder whether the Microsoft billionaire comprehends the political battle in which charter school forces find themselves locked in New York. There are currently but 24 charter schools operating in the city, while the Tweed Trust operates 1,100 public schools. One of the UFT’s representatives in the state assembly, Steven Sanders, a Manhattan Democrat and chairman of the education committee, is out to smother the movement. In a bill that might as well be called the Charter School Strangulation Act, he proposes to slash charter school funding — which is already only about two-thirds of the expenditure for each student at public schools — and put a freeze on the approval of new charters. Under current law, charter schools receive no money to build facilities.

One doesn’t have to read past the first entry in the new Forbes magazine list of billionaires, issued last night, to see that for only 1% or so of his fortune, Mr. Gates could ignite an education revolution in the city. He could do this by underwriting serious numbers of new charter schools that would be freed of the grip of the UFT and the regulations and ideology that cripple public schools. He could radically strengthen the ability of Mr. Klein to face down the UFT in the contract negotiations that are now underway and that will define Mr. Klein’s legacy. It’s hard to imagine a man of Mr. Klein’s brilliance failing to think of this greatest of opportunities at trustbusting as he strode alongside the man whose empire he once tried to bring down.