The settlement won yesterday by Schools Chancellor Klein is a victory for those who wish to see the breaking of the Tweed Trust. Mr. Klein fended off a legal challenge to the elimination of the 32 community school districts — traditional patronage houses of the teachers unions — which the chancellor wants to replace with 10 administrative regions. While the ultimate effectiveness of this reorganization will need to be proven on the ground, control and accountability lie where they should: with Mayor Bloomberg and his administration. Mayoral control means that the city’s executive must have the freedom to succeed or fail, it being up to the voters to decide which he has done.

“The mayor and the school chancellor have blinked,” the state senator who launched the lawsuit, Carl Kruger, said yesterday. But if the administration has blinked, the senator and the chairman of the Assembly’s education committee, Steve Sanders, a teachers-union-friendly Democrat who joined the suit, have gone permanently blind. The school districts have been retained in only the most technical way: There will only be two full-time staff members at each of the 32 offices, a “parent liaison,” and a clerical worker; also, from time to time Mr. Klein’s 113 local instructional supervisors will have to pick straws to see what 32 among them is stuck pulling district office duty. In short, the staffs of these offices have been cut to less than 100 from about 5,000 since the Bloomberg-Klein team came on the scene.

“We’ve taken about half the people out of this bureaucracy,” Mr. Klein told the Sun yesterday. “I don’t think any rational person thought that bureaucracy was good.” The unions and their stooges, however, are not always rational. Randi Weingarten’s United Federation of Teachers went off the deep end when Mr. Klein had the audacity to cut the jobs of 864 paraprofessionals — sparing teachers — during one of the worst budget crises in the city’s history. Their response was to launch a racial discrimination lawsuit. So, with thousands of patronage jobs on the line, and with the unions getting set to break ranks with the Bloomberg administration ahead of the upcoming contract negotiations, could any less resistance have been expected?

A victory such as Mr. Klein’s yesterday, however, is a transitory thing. At one time the idea of 32 community school districts seemed as reasonable as 10 instructional regions do today to Mr. Klein. There is nothing to prevent this new structure from growing as sclerotic as did the structure that preceded it. Nothing, that is, but the introduction of more choice into the city’s educational system. While Messrs. Kruger and Sanders rolled over today, Mr. Sanders is still fighting the charter school movement with help from his counterpart in the Senate. It is choice — in the form of charters and vouchers — that will force the public school system to shape up ultimately and, more importantly, will guarantee a better education for our children now.