The state Legislature has made a major down payment on Albany's debt to city children by committing to substantially increase school construction funding. More than 100 new schools, holding 60,000 kids, may soon be on the drawing board.

Lawmakers gave Mayor Bloomberg the power to raise $11.2 billion for a historic building campaign. Those new schools, plus renovated science labs, libraries, art rooms and gyms, are needed for the city to reduce class sizes and add services such as prekindergarten.

Long has it been since a mayor brought such a rasher of bacon home from the Capitol, and Bloomberg deserves an ovation for making an offer lawmakers couldn't refuse: Get with my program, or your district will know who killed its new school.

The mayor also made a wise tactical choice in pressing this year for construction help rather than for lots of new money for general school purposes. The courts have ordered Albany to dramatically increase both types of funding, but wringing billions in operating aid out of Gov. Pataki and the Legislature was not in the offing. Nor could Bloomberg have optimally used that money without first opening new schools. So he went for, and got, the wherewithal to build.

The deal set a crucial precedent by breaking the Legislature's insistence on distributing fixed proportions of school aid to the city, suburbs and upstate regardless of how much each needed to deliver what the state's highest court termed a "sound, basic education." For now, the city will get more than an arbitrary 38% of state education aid.

Make no mistake: The fight for proper school funding is far from over. To fully comply with court mandates, the Legislature should be increasing operating aid for city schools by a billion dollars or more this year. Instead, the pols came up with less than half that much. But that's a battle for next year. Meanwhile, Bloomberg should get busy building as quickly and economically as possible.

(c) New York Daily News, L.P.: reproduced with permission.