ALBANY – Cardinal Egan proposed his own solution yesterday to the multibillion-dollar payout to New York City schools required by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case: Send the students to us.

The cardinal, at the state capital for an annual lobbying effort on behalf of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, listed education as this year’s top legislative priority. He urged Governor Pataki and other lawmakers to get behind a bill that would provide tuition tax credits to parents who wish to educate their children outside public schools.

As part of that effort, Cardinal Egan did not hesitate to identify two obstacles to parental choice. He said the leadership at teachers unions is “bent on maintaining an unsatisfactory status quo,” and he said editorial writers who oppose tuition credits do so not from sound arguments but because “they a have a position to defend at any cost.”

The head of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, responded by contrasting Cardinal Egan with his predecessor, Cardinal O’Connor. She said Cardinal O’Connor had been a friend to the union and would “never have attacked public-school teachers and their union, as Cardinal Egan did.”

Ms. Weingarten urged Cardinal Egan to “reconsider his words” out of deference to hard-working teachers at public and parochial schools, adding, “We want to work to help the Catholic schools out of their crisis of declining enrollment and school closings, but attacking the teachers and the teachers’ union is not the answer.”

There are 287 Roman Catholic schools and 105,000 students within the 10-county region covered by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. At 116 of those schools, including 21 high schools, 65% or more of the enrolled students come from families that live at or below the poverty line. According to the archdiocese, 95% of the students from those high schools go on to attend college.

Cardinal Egan, who announced last month the pending closure of six schools within archdiocese, including Greenwich Village’s St. Anthony of Padua, used those statistics as an argument in favor of tuition tax credits. He said the state would save money by giving parents who wish to send their children to parochial schools a tax credit. The average cost of educating a public-school student after implementation of the CFE ruling could be as high as $18,000, he said, while the average annual tuition at schools in the archdiocese is $3,000.

“Even with the new math, you can figure out that this would be to the benefit of the state-controlled education system,” Cardinal Egan said.

According to the proposed bill, all parents would receive a tax credit of $1,500 a child or $3,000 total for education-related costs. Parents of students in public schools could use the credit toward after-school programs, books, or other education-related expenses. Parents who educate their children at home or in private schools would receive the same credit against their income tax for tuition or other education expenses.

The bill, sponsored by state Senator Martin Golden, a Republican of Brooklyn, has been introduced in different forms over the past several years without success. Mr. Golden said yesterday he thinks the closure of parochial schools in the Diocese of Brooklyn and the New York archdiocese could make the bill more attractive to lawmakers.

“This is the first time there has been a reason to really study a bill like this to see if it helps a city as large as New York cope with these closings,” Mr. Golden said. “This is not a Brooklyn or Queens or New York issue. This is something that is going to affect the entire state, and at the end of the day could have big consequences if these schools close.”

The New York State Catholic Conference drew hundreds from across the state to lobby on issues including school choice, stem-cell research, human cloning, the death penalty, and sentencing guidelines for drug-related crimes.