Charter schools were first touted in the Empire State as a way of improving all schools by introducing competition and choice to the system – and saving the taxpayers money. By creating competition for the conventional public schools, all schools, we were told, would end up doing better. This is idea has been subverted in a dangerous way, and there is no better example than in New York, where civil discourse seems no longer possible when discussing charters.

During the 1990s when charters were first discussed here, the complaint about the public schools was always that the huge taxpayer expenditures being made for them weren’t reaching the classroom, but rather were lost in administrative bureaucracy. The address of the headquarters of the old Board of Education, 110 Livingston Street, became a symbol of profligate government waste and excess.

Mayor Giuliani challenged Chancellor Ramon Cortines to calculate the number of administrative employees at the Board, a task that the veteran educator seemed unable to complete, much to Mr. Cortines’s embarrassment and the mayor’s delight. The mayor, who controlled the budget, forced the reluctant Mr. Cortines to cut thousands of jobs, cuts the chancellor claimed would cripple the schools. They didn’t. By the following year the mayor drove Mr. Cortines out of his job and out of town.

The city’s highly regarded Catholic Schools meanwhile subsisted on a central office staff of about a dozen, yet often managed to outperform their public school counterparts. They became the model for the “lean and mean” funding formula allocated to charters, the rock on which the charter concept was built.

The argument was that charters could do a better job for less, since they wouldn’t have to contribute to the huge administrative overhead of the central offices. All the funds, we were told, would end up in the classroom. That is the genesis of the funding formula that gives charters about 20% less in funds per student than students in conventional public schools.

But as the charter movement grows, advocates are now taking a different tack.

“A child in a public charter school shouldn’t be worth less than any other public school student. The proposed budget in Albany takes an already unfair situation and makes it worse,” said Dacia Toll, president of Achievement First, which runs nine charter schools at Brooklyn and a few at Connecticut.

With the state in financial distress, schools like Ms. Toll’s stand to lose funding. Because their funding is tied to that of the public schools, they will lose an amount proportional to that cut from the public schools. In real dollars, this is less of a loss than the public schools are suffering, particularly because during the past ten years as state spending on public education soared, charters benefited proportionately. Is what’s good for the goose good for the gander?

Not according to charter advocates. Apparently the original premise of reduced public funding resulting from lower overhead to no longer seems so advantageous. After all, are we really reducing “central office costs,” when Eva Moskowitz can be paid a salary of $371,000 to run four charter schools — about 50% more than Chancellor Klein earns to run the city’s 1,400 or so public schools? Or others can squander public funds on contracts to relatives such as the Bronx school that hired a bus company owned by a trustee’s husband or another that pays rent to a non-profit run by the school’s board chairman?

Mark that the New York State Court of Appeals has ruled that current law blocks the State Comptroller from auditing charter schools, despite the public funds involved.

Other funding inequities obtain, largely at the expense of the conventional public schools. While charters are free to raise money from non-profits and rich benefactors without restriction and put the funds to whatever use they wish, public schools are severely constrained. Chancellor’s regulations forbid parents from raising money to pay for the addition of, say, a music teacher or any other pedagogue. There are also limitations on the number of fundraisers a school can run, and even on the type of products sold to students at a good old-fashioned bake sale.

According to Newsday, in a comprehensive article on the newly forming charters in 1999, “applications may be submitted by parents, teachers, school administrators, community residents or any combination of these groups. This can be done independently, or in cooperation with a college, museum, nonprofit agency or for-profit business.”

Not suggested at the time was the involvement of politicians such as Ms. Moskowitz, a former City Council member from Manhattan, or Carmen Arroyo, assembly woman of the Bronx. The Daily News released a series of emails between Ms. Moskowitz and Chancellor Klein that didn’t reflect well on either, exposing the “insider’s advantage” that the politician has over, say, a parent or community group. At least Ms. Moskowitz appears to be protecting her school’s interests.

Ms. Arroyo suggests a more ominous concern. She was a key figure in the corruption scandals that tainted the old decentralized school system, where she dispensed jobs in the old District 7 with clubhouse panache. Her grandson, Richard Izquierdo Arroyo, who was also her chief of staff, surfaced as the chairman of the board of two charters in the south Bronx, until he was forced to resign after being indicted, an investigation that implicated both his grandmother and his aunt, Maria del Carmen Arroyo, who serves in the City Council. Izquierdo Arroyo pled guilty to corruption charges and awaits sentencing, while the investigation continues of his grandmother and aunt continues, who have denied wrongdoing.

In Queens, charters run by groups associated with an oft-investigated state senator, Malcolm Smith, have come also under intense scrutiny in the press.

Is it too much to ask the agencies funded with taxpayer’s dollars be answerable to the elected state and city fiscal officers? Shoudn’t fiscal integrity be the least the public can expect from charters?

Educational integrity is important as well, a problem in conventional public schools as well as charters. Currently a mayoral appointee oversees investigations of corruption or cheating in the public schools. A better idea would be a special prosecutor, with unfettered oversight of all schools that receive public funds.

Finally, a major problem with the charters here in New York is that rather than generate healthy competition to provide better results in all public schools, charters and conventional, it has instead spawned a destructive schoolyard brawl between parents, egged on by education officials.

The idea that the chancellor of the New York City public schools should simultaneously be intimately involved in the approval, assignment of resources, and running of charters goes against the original charter concept of independence. After all, do we let the management of Gimbel’s run Macy’s? It’s no wonder thatcharter advocates are happy with the current arrangement, since the emails between Ms. Moskowitz and Mr. Klein demonstrate how far this chancellor is willing to go to aid the charters.

Imagine, though, another mayor and chancellor, antagonistic towards charters, making decisions harmful to charter schools. The only way to insure the independence of charters over the long haul and guarantee that conventional schools are treated fairly as well, is to put real distance between the two systems. It is the feeling of many public school parents that the resources at many public schools are being diverted to the charters, a perception that has led to confrontations between groups of parents, exactly the kind of outcome we should be avoiding.

I believe in the concept of charter schools. But I recognize that misplaced cheerleading will in the final analysis do more harm to the charters than good. If the legislature increases the charter cap, it should enact controls to insure that the public’s funds are spent wisely, and the education of children, not the enrichment of adults, is the paramount reason for every school’s existence.