Speculation is percolating, in advance of the mayor’s “State of the City ” address scheduled for Wednesday, that Mr. Bloomberg will use the occasion to announce changes to the city’s schools system. The Daily News had a column suggesting that the mayor and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, are planning to privatize some management of the schools. That report prompted a denial by Mr. Klein last week, as the New York Times and the New York Post reported it, to the effect that “I will not contract out the management of public schools.”

That may sound like a flat-out denial, but, in the world of education, “management” can mean a lot of things. For example, the United Federation of Teachers manages two charter schools in New York City under charters that are essentially a contract. No one interpreted Mr. Klein’s statement about not contracting out as a pledge to revoke the UFT’s charters. The charters were granted by the board of the State University of New York. In some sense, though, the school is part of a public school system headed by Messrs. Klein and Bloomberg, who, if they wanted to, could recommend that the UFT’s charter be revoked.

It’s not as if contracting out the operation of individual schools is some far-out right-wing heresy. A report released last month from the National Center on Education, produced by a commission that included an eminent labor leader, Morton Bahr of the Communications Workers of America; President Clinton’s education secretary, Richard Riley, and Mr. Klein, who is a former Clinton administration Justice Department official himself, backed the idea of schools “operated by independent contractors, many of them limited-liability corporations owned and run by teachers.” Mr. Bloomberg heralded the release of that report with an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal.

Even so, the mere mention of contracting out or privatizing schools sends the reactionary forces in this city — and by this we mean organized labor and its pawns — to the barricades. Our columnist Andrew Wolf reports that Thursday, at the headquarters of the Communication Workers of America, a meeting took place that included a number of elected officials, among them Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum and Presidents Stringer of Manhattan and Marshall of Queens, parent representatives, unions, left-wing advocacy groups such as ACORN, and representatives of the Working Families Party, which convened the conclave. Among the things they reportedly considered, according to Mr. Wolf, is a lawsuit to block any privatization effort. One wonders how such a lawsuit would be crafted to keep the UFT’s charter schools operating.

The fact is that many of the parents in the city who can afford it have chosen to contract out the management of their children’s educations to private independent or religious schools. If Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein are going to allow their decision-making to be dictated by Ms. Gotbaum, Mr. Stringer, the Working Families Party, and Bertha Lewis of ACORN, the sad fact will be that it will be a sign that the management of the schools has already been contracted out — just not to the people the voters elected to manage the schools, and without any accountability for students and parents.