In a spirited hearing, the Boston City Council passed Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s new fiscal year budget Wednesday, though several councilors expressed disappointment with his prescribed level of funding for schools.

The $2.98 billion budget stands as the largest in Boston’s history. Almost one-third of those funds are for Boston Public Schools, which will receive about $18 million more than the previous fiscal year. City councilors had rejected Walsh’s first budget proposal, after which his administration upped school funding totals by nearly $5 million.

Imagine you live in a city with a set of open-enrollment public schools, serving predominantly low-income children of color, where students learn at twice the rate of their peers in neighboring schools. And what if those high-performing schools were ready, willing, and able to enroll more students, maybe even double or triple in size? Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Well, that city actually exists, and it’s Boston. But, remarkably, the powers that be are blocking the city’s best schools from growing for the simple reason that they are charter schools...

Voters should get ready for a high-profile ballot fight over charter schools this fall, after a compromise bill meant to avert that fight emerged Thursday to lukewarm reviews from Governor Charlie Baker and other key players.

The Senate legislation attempts to bridge the yawning divide on the issue by giving advocates the green light for more charter schools in Boston and other low-performing districts, while giving critics tighter restrictions on how charter schools operate across the state.

Within a few hours of the legislation’s unveiling, Baker, a Republican who strongly supports charter schools, issued a statement opposing the bill because it doesn’t do enough to expand charters in the state. “The proposal offers no relief to 34,000 students currently on a waiting list to access high-performing public charter schools,” he said....