A new state Board of Regents report on the charter school movement in New York offers an instructive overview of this innovation in public education. What the report really does, though, is help make the case for a law better than the one hurriedly passed in 1998.

What's needed, when the Legislature reconvenes, is a law that sets up a more streamlined and sensible means of oversight and financing.

Because these schools are supposed models of independence from normal bureaucratic controls, the state's position largely has been to watch and to help the schools when needed, but not to step in forcefully when a school's direction seems decidedly negative. That's too laissez-faire.

Also, the state should pay for charters out of a different pot, and make sure districts aren't penalized.

Charter schools are too promising an approach to be undone by a poor enabling law. Change is needed.

- The Democrat & Chronicle of Rochester

Republicans who control the Senate and House chamber last week killed a proposal to create an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate how the response to Hurricane Katrina went so lethally wrong. But the need for the panel is as obvious as the reason for Congress' resistance.

The damage of the hurricane and its aftermath was due, in part, to multiple failures of government at every level. The only hope of fixing these problems is to understand what the problems were, where they occurred and why. That can be done only outside a political context.

Ideologically, an independent probe will hurt. Republican leaders know a fair investigation could further diminish public confidence in their governance. What is more, the Katrina catastrophe shows that government matters, and for the moment, the federal one is in the hands of a party that has spent years arguing that it doesn't.

- The Buffalo News