How can a Republican get votes in the Big Apple?  Mayoral candidate Joe Lhota thinks promises of charter schools will help.

In a recent advertisement analyzed in the New York Times, Lhota critiques Democratic candidate Bill de Blasio for threatening to charge rent to charter schools.  Lhota, in contrast, promises to double the number of such schools.

Why?  According to the ad, charter schools promise the best educational hope for “inner city” kids.

Charter schools also represent the first best hope for many conservative educational activists.  The free-market conservatives at the Heritage Foundation, for example, insist that expanding the number of charter schools will expand educational opportunity for all.

Lhota does not seem to support charters in order to prove his conservative credentials, however.  Just the opposite.  Charter schools, Lhota claimed, were the real “progressive education approach.”  Lhota insisted that his support for charters proved that he was the real educational progressive in this race.  “If you oppose charter schools,” Lhota told the Association for a Better New York, “and the programs and the other choices that are available for minorities and inner city children, and children of immigrants, you cannot call yourself a progressive.”

That’s educational politics for you: the more conservative mayoral candidate endorsing a school program beloved by conservatives and calling it the progressive choice.