Next week, New York’s Legislature will have to make a choice between parents and politics. If New York City’s parents are to have an effective voice in their neighborhoods’ schools over the coming year, Assemblyman Steven Sanders, the Democratic chairman of the education committee, will have to get his act and his colleagues together to pass a law creating the “district education councils” — consisting of eight parents, two civic leaders, and one high school senior — that were suggested back in February by a legislative task force that he chaired. The legislation that gave the mayor control of the city’s school system last summer also abolished the 32 community school boards as of June 30, 2003. As The New York Sun reported last month, if the Legislature doesn’t act before it adjourns next Thursday, parents will be stuck with these lame-duck boards for another year.

The question, however, is whether this isn’t exactly what Mr. Sanders and his friends in the teachers unions want. The assemblyman was a party to the lawsuit that a Brooklyn state senator, Carl Kruger, brought against the city for dismantling the 32 district offices. The suit was settled Tuesday, with Messrs. Sanders and Kruger and friends accepting an ignominious defeat; the city agreed to maintain only skeletal three-person offices where there used to stand hundred-employee-strong patronage mills. The offices were doomed one way or another — Schools Chancellor Klein had gone so far as to begin physically dismantling them — but the legislators had wanted to show the city who’s boss. Having failed in their gam bit, they now can thumb their noses at the Bloomberg administration through passive resistance.

Mr. Sanders’s office denies that this is what is happening. “There is a very remote chance” that a bill will be passed, Mr. Sanders’s chief of staff, Steven Kaufman, told the Sun yesterday — adding that their office is doing every thing it can to get the job done. However, Mr. Kaufman said, given the late date, the legislation faces “almost impossible odds.” It must be drafted, cleared with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, passed, and signed by the governor. “The assemblyman had warned the city, when we were in the last days of the settlement negotiations, that there was so little time,” Mr. Kaufman said. “We advised the city that we needed every day.…These months that we lost were precious.”

What is striking about these statements from Mr. Sanders’s office is that it is somewhat akin to the Menendez brothers asking the court for leniency because they are orphans. The months Mr. Kaufman refers to were lost during a lawsuit to which Mr. Sanders was a party. Mr. Kaufman claimed yesterday that to draft final legislation his office needed to know the fate of the 32 districts. But there was plenty of time between February 15 — when Mr. Sanders’s task force issued its report proposing the district councils — and today to draw out various scenarios and draft alternate versions of a bill.

In an afterword to his task force’s final report, Mr. Sanders said that the new district councils “will foster an environment for meaningful parental and community representation and input.” The afterword also said: “The local community governance structure cannot exist in a vacuum. It must be logically connected with and accountable to the rest of the citywide educational governance structure.” This certainly won’t be the case if the Legislature fails to update the state’s education law in time to avert a yearlong reign by obsolete school boards. As the Queens District 25 president, Darlene Fleishman, told our Kathleen Lucadamo in May, “Being here another year is a waste of everybody’s time.” What the Legislature does in the next week will be telling as to whether Mr. Sanders et al care more about making a political point or giving parents a voice.