Schools Chancellor Klein recently announced that he is supporting increasing the number of charter schools allowed in New York, which are capped at 100 under current law. It is a remarkable statement.

When I first met the chancellor upon his appointment, I told him that he should think of himself as having just been appointed premier of the former Soviet Union. I believe he misunderstood me. He thought I was saying he was inheriting a dysfunctional bureaucracy. True. But I was trying to communicate something else.

I meant that the Board of Education’s fundamental problem isn’t bad chancellors – just as the Soviet Union’s fundamental problem wasn’t bad premiers. Rather, the problem is the system itself, and no matter how enlightened the chancellor himself is, it won’t make a difference if the system remains.

I feared that Mr. Klein wouldn’t get this – that he would think that he could make the monopoly work. As the former head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, the chancellor understood the intellectual arguments against monopolies. But the problem is that the chancellor is exceptionally talented, hard-working, and capable – and he knows it. Such can-do people think that they can rise to any challenge.

Thus, I feared trust-buster Klein’s abstract knowledge that monopolies don’t work would be defeated by can-do Klein’s primal faith that he can make anything work.

To his credit, the chancellor from the beginning promoted charter schools. But I nonetheless sensed that he was Pollyannaish about the problems of the school system. He seemed over confident about what could be accomplished by the monopoly under his direction and therefore tended to regard charter schools as a side show.

With Mr. Klein’s announcement that he wants to lift the cap on charter schools, it is now clear that he sees competition as central to the health of our educational system. I suspect this knowledge is borne in large measure of the frustrations of running the Department of Education. In particular, the chancellor has been unable to negotiate a more flexible contract for teachers. This is because he lacks the leverage that competition brings. With competition, an employer can say to his employees, “If we don’t change these inefficient work rules, our competitors are going to eat our lunch and we’re going to be out of our jobs.” But since the Department of Education has no competition, the chancellor has no leverage.

This experience, I suspect, accounts in large measure for the chancellor’s ever stronger support for charter schools. Nonetheless, his support for lifting the cap is remarkable. After all, the primary feature of charter schools is that they are not subject to control by the chancellor. So the chancellor is implicitly saying that we need more schools that aren’t run by him. It is an understanding to which only a chancellor of exceptional wisdom could come.

Ms. Moskowitz is chairwoman of the City Council’s Education Committee.