ALBANY – The disagreement between New York City and Albany over the multibillion-dollar schools financing lawsuit cut a little deeper yesterday, as the city’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, told lawmakers that New York is a victim of “systematic discrimination in funding.”

Speaking at a joint legislative budget hearing, Mr. Klein called Governor Pataki’s budget “woefully inadequate” and urged lawmakers to right a “historic wrong” by pouring billions more dollars into the city’s school system.

“While I’m proud of the progress we have made in the past year, we could have made more – much more – if the city were not bearing the brunt of years of systematic discrimination in funding by the State of New York,” he said.

The chancellor has previously called on Albany to comply with the order of a state Supreme Court justice in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case by giving the city an additional $23 billion in schools funding over five years. Yesterday, his message was one of exasperation and anger.

Mr. Klein’s increasingly hostile attitude reflects a deepening strain between Mayor Bloomberg and Senate Republicans, which partly stems from the latter’s resistance to the judge’s order. Republican lawmakers and the governor strongly object to the amount of money a court-appointed panel said the state owes the city to resolve the case, claiming the state cannot afford to pay the $23 billion figure.

The choice of language used by the chancellor, evocative of the struggle for civil rights, was not an accident. He accused the state of shortchanging school districts with heavy minority populations.

“In terms of the gap between spending on students in the highest and lowest minority school districts, the only states worse than New York are Wyoming and North Dakota,” Mr. Klein said.

On the issue of charter schools, Mr. Klein praised the governor’s decision to lift the cap on such schools, which are independent of the local school districts, but said Mr. Bloomberg should be given independent “chartering authority.” Currently, when the city approves charter schools, the Board of Regents must sign off on them.

As Mr. Bloomberg did when he reviewed the governor’s budget before lawmakers last month, Mr. Klein suggested Mr. Pataki’s office was providing misleading figures about the percentage of funding city schools are receiving. Mr. Klein calculated that the city is actually receiving 8% of new state education money, a figure much lower than the one given by Mr. Pataki’s budget office.

The chancellor’s figure takes into account a program in the governor’s budget, called STAR-Plus, that gives property tax relief to homeowners throughout the state but excludes New York City residents. Mr. Klein said the property tax rebates provided under the plan are essentially education aid.

A spokesman for the governor’s budget office, Michael Marr, said he disagrees with Mr. Klein’s analysis. “The Chancellor’s STAR-struck testimony is simply wrong. STAR is a property tax relief program and is no more state school aid than the mayor’s property tax rebate checks are city school aid,” he said in a statement.