There are a lot of charter schools in Harlem and they’re a very popular option for Harlem parents, so many local residents were involved in advocacy for the New York State Legislature to allow more charters to open. The local state senator, however, has become a charter opponent. And his stated reason for opposition is mighty odd:

But Mr. Perkins’s stance on charters has turned him into something of a polarizing figure himself. He says he opposes an increase in charter schools, even though many of his constituents seem to want more of them, because he believes they have allowed the mayor and the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, to abdicate their responsibility to improve Harlem’s regular elementary schools, which have shrunk as more parents have chosen charters.

“If there are people fleeing from something, it is cause for alarm,” he said in an interview in his office. Using an analogy he favors when talking about charter schools, he said: “That should tell you there is a fire, and those who are responsible should find out what is causing that fire, not just create a new place for those who flee and leave the rest inside to burn there.”

It’s of course true that it would be strange to ignore an ongoing fire in favor of simply creating new places for people to flee to. But by the same token, it would be strange to refuse to accommodate people who’ve fled a burning building on the grounds that you need to put the fire out.

The world of education politics often seems oddly dominated by the presupposition that doing one thing somehow precludes you from doing anything else. New York’s relative stinginess about letting charter schools open has created a very high quality pool of charters. You almost certainly couldn’t increase the number of charters to a high enough level to accommodate everyone while maintaining the standard of quality. So as Perkins says, it’s crucial to work on improving the city’s “regular” public schools. But there’s no reason to think that creating some new opportunities for people to open charters in any way prevents improvements in the regular city schools from happening.

If anything, the existence of a modest degree of competition from charter operators can help motivate the officials in charge of the main NYC public schools to think hard about making the schools they’re running more appealing. In the suburbs of a large metropolitan area, you basically have parallel public school systems competing against each other—if Town A’s schools perform much better than Town B’s, then that makes Town A more attractive and its property values go up. Which gives officials in both towns incentives to try to deliver a reasonable standard of educational services. Lower income urban families typically don’t have that range of options in terms of where they want to live, but having charters operate in parallel with other schools creates something of the same effect.

There’s a great graphic in today’s NYT summing up the past uses of the budget reconciliation process and making it clear that pretty much everything Republican Senators have said on the subject is a lie.

Reps Mike Pence and Jeb Hensarling have a “plan” to reduce government spending by writing a constitutional amendment that would restrict spending to 20 percent of GDP.

Daniel Gross decided to follow this idea up with a bit of reporting:

I e-mailed Mary Vought, press secretary of the House Republican Conference, to see if Reps. Pence and Hensarling had any specific ideas of what to cut. The answer: not really. “That’s not what the Spending Limit Amendment is about,” she e-mailed back. The congressmen do have ideas to reform spending, but the real issue is to focus on the process. “Talking about savings in the budget before we have even decided how much the savings need to be is putting the cart before the horse.”

I don’t have much of a settled view about Jeb Hensarling, but we’re seeing here again that Mike Pence is a stone-cold idiot. In terms of carts and horses, this is just bizarre. The appropriate level of overall government spending should be determined by adding up the level of specific spending on worthwhile things. Programs that are ineffective, or whose impact is small relative to the impact of the taxes needed to pay for them, should be cut or eliminated. Programs that are good should be maintained or expanded. Settling on an arbitrary number first and then making unspecified cuts to reach the target is ridiculous.