You’d almost think Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and Council Member Eva Moskowitz were doing something right, the way the teachers union has been carrying on in the last few days. In a letter released to the public Tuesday, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, accused Ms. Moskowitz of trying to silence teachers. This, because Ms. Weingarten didn’t extend a specific invitation to the UFT to testify at a hearing today on the city’s middle schools. “It is unfortunate that you have decided their input and insights are not necessary or not worthy of consideration,” Ms. Weingarten wrote to Ms. Moskowitz. The councilwoman, New Yorkers will remember, convened hearings last month on the teachers’ contract and gave Ms. Weingarten center stage. A UFT representative is now on the schedule for today’s hearing.

Earlier this week, the UFT squealed to the Public Employment Relations Board at Albany, claiming that Mr. Klein’s Department of Education has made it impossible to negotiate a new teachers’ contract. “Bargaining always has its rough-and-tumble side — that comes with the territory. But the DOE’s behavior goes way beyond that,” Ms. Weingarten wrote to her 80,000 members in their weekly newsletter. By “the DOE’s behavior,” Ms. Weingarten presumably meant Mr. Klein’s insistence on telling the truth about what education expert Sol Stern has called the “we don’t do windows” contract. Would Ms. Weingarten claim that the current contract does not prevent Mr. Klein from paying more for teachers in hard-to-staff subjects such as math? Would she claim that it does not prevent Mr. Klein from allocating teachers to the schools where he feels they are most needed? Would she claim that principals’ authority over hiring and firing is adequate?

That Ms. Weingarten would claim Mr. Klein or Ms. Moskowitz has poisoned the process — as she has claimed about both of them repeatedly in recent weeks — shows the position from which she is negotiating. In effect, by claiming that sunlight is poison, Ms. Weingarten is admitting that her contract, if the public were to truly understand it, could not be defended. The truths being pointed out by Mr. Klein, and dissected by Ms. Moskowitz, do not stand up to scrutiny before the citizens who pay for the school system and the parents who send their children to the city’s public schools — or find themselves unable to do so. With control of the school system finally in the mayor’s hands, the city has the chance to get a real reform. Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Klein can see this contract fight through to the end, and they can refuse to sign any document that does not give them the authority that the voters want them to have in running the city’s schools.

The city is behind the mayor on this. They want him, and the trust-buster he brought in, to break the Tweed Trust. They want him to fight. The only way he can fail is to shrink from what could be a famous battle. It would be unfathomable for him to shrink from a battle upon which rests the fate of so many children. That’s not to mention this city’s ability to retain its middle class — something, as Joel Kotkin sets forth elsewhere on this page, about which it ought to be concerned. The UFT and the politicians it buys and sells can complain all they want. But with charter schools gaining ground, vouchers clouded by less and less legal turmoil, and the president’s No Child Left Behind law beginning to be felt, the contract will have to fall, and the children, for once, will have to be put first.