This morning's Daily News has a story that says at least a third of the court-ordered $1.9 billion windfall for city schools under the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit will be eaten up by teacher salaries contained in the newly-negotiated teacher contract.

The implication, at least the way I've heard it from some critics, is that this is a waste of CFE's hard work. Perhaps. But let me play devil's advocate and twist it around a little bit. If you were running a public charter school and you were suddenly given another $1,700 for each of your students, ($42,500 for each classroom of 25 students) how much of that would you invest toward increasing the salary of the teacher at the front of that room?

Put that way, doesn't a third seem a bit low?

I admit I have no way to quantify this, (and I could be very wrong) but I know of many charter school operators and board members who believe that their ability to staff-up with the best teachers possible is crucial to their own ability to provide a "sound basic education" for their kids. I'd like to think a good many of them would invest a significant chunk of this cash in supporting the salaries and working conditions of the teaching force, and that they would view this investment as a way to attract and retain the best teachers. (And I'd predict that charter schools that aren't thinking this way will be the very first to see NYSUT organizing drives in their faculty lounges.)

When you've got a great teacher, paying him or her $100,000 doesn't see like a stretch at all to me.

If there is a problem with having a third of the CFE money being eaten up by the new UFT contract, it would seem that it isn't the amount being allocated, but the fact that there is no connection at all between the money and teacher greatness. (That's more a knock on the new Bloomberg contract with teachers than on CFE.)

This is another reminder that we're about to pump billions more into a system that still isn't built in a way that will do things much differently once it gets the cash. Sure we may dabble in more crappy-to-mediocre preschool programs and we'll get a couple buildings fixed here and there, but will anything really change in the city's public schools?

So you tell me, charterworld: How much of this cash would you pass on to your best teachers? Give me your best argument at TheChalkboard@nycsa.org.