The United Federation of Teachers says it is ready to give up some of the onerous work rules in the teachers contract. The caveat is that it is only willing to do so on an experimental basis, in one of the 10 administrative regions at most, and in exchange the teachers at those schools would get more power in their schools’ administration. It’s an intriguing proposal, as it could lead to ground common to the union and those seeking to bust the Tweed Trust. While vouchers giving poor parents the choice to escape the failing public school system altogether remain taboo to the union, the virtues of charter schools may begin to make themselves obvious.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the UFT, has been telling anyone who will listen — including The New York Sun’s editors yesterday — about the diktats from the Tweed Courthouse. Teachers, Ms. Weingarten told us, are being turned into “Robo-Teachers.” They are told how to arrange their classrooms, how to set up a bulletin board, and how much time to the minute to spend on different lessons. “Why bother having teachers, when all some superintendents want is robots who will follow orders come down from on high,” Ms. Weingarten said week. To the extent the reports are true it is all an insult to the professionalism of our teaching corps.

But there’s a reason Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have resorted to such draconian measures: New York City’s public schools have failed spectacularly. Right or wrong, the city has decided that uniform curricula in math and English are the key to turning the whole thing around. Mr. Bloomberg has staked his lega cy on this head. Thus does it seem logical that the administration is not going to be ready to cut the work-rule deal Ms. Weingarten has sketched. Asked yesterday what the management of schools would look like with more teacher authority, Ms. Weingarten answered candidly, “I don’t know the answer to that question.” But our bet is that you could expect a scaling back of the uniformity of the curriculum.

Should the administration be unwilling to take the union up on its offer of an experiment with loosened work rules in exchange for more teacher control of schools, one logical turn would be toward charter schools, which, even more than traditional public schools, respect the professionalism of their staff and nurture cooperative teaching environments. Asked about this possibility yesterday, Ms. Weingarten protested that charter schools don’t get enough funding — by law they get about two-thirds the per student allocation of traditional public schools. But this is like the lad who kills his parents and then asks the court for mercy as an orphan. It is the teachers union, not charter school supporters, that has kept the schools’ funding low. KIPP Academy makes up the difference, about $250,000 a year, with private fundraising. And it seems there are more than enough private funds to go around. Microsoft’s founder, William Gates, gave $51 million to New York City’s public schools just last week, and another billionaire, Eli Broad, just gave $4 million. Those donations alone just about could make up the shortfall for 50 KIPPs for five years. There will always be an excuse. But if the union is serious about professionalism, decentralizing control and giving parents more choices, there is a clear way forward.