Last year, centrist New York governor Kathy Hochul used state budget negotiations to push through a massive giveaway of public funds for the construction of a new Buffalo Bills stadium in her hometown. With this year’s budget process — apparently unfazed by the Democratic state legislature’s embarrassing rejection of her nominee for chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals — Hochul is again pushing conservative priorities. This time, that includes advancing the school privatization movement.

Hochul’s preliminary $227 billion state budget proposal for the fiscal year 2024, unveiled on February 1, contains a proposal to lift the statewide cap on privately run charter schools. This would create licenses for more than eighty new charters to operate in the state; it would also revive close to two dozen “zombie” charters, charter schools that had previously failed. Factoring in a loophole in state law that allows each corporate charter to operate an elementary, middle, and high school, the charter cap raise could mean the creation of close to 320 additional charter schools statewide.

Creating more privately run yet publicly funded charter schools was a terrible idea under former NYC mayor and “school choice” evangelist Michael Bloomberg, and it’s even more indefensible today.