Those left wondering, in the face of a mountain of evidence, whether the United Federation of Teachers is an impediment to education reform in New York City need ponder the question no longer. Such innocent souls need only read an account of the hearing today at which the City Council’s education committee, under Chairwoman Eva Moskowitz, exposed the teachers contract. They will spot the telltale sign of those who are fleecing the public: They wince at daylight. Thus the tirade of the president of the UFT, Randi Weingarten, directed at Ms. Moskowitz: “This hearing will not help to encourage outside-of-the-box thinking. It is tantamount to negotiating a contract in public,” Ms. Weingarten, who tried to quash the hearings before they even got off the ground, growled in her testimony.

Well, heaven forfend. Councilwoman Moskowitz has permitted the public — the ones paying the teachers’ salaries, and the ones whose children have for so long been so ill-served by the city’s education establishment — to peek at negotiations.

“Forcing participants in collective bargaining to make public commitments up front makes great headlines, but it also makes the participants’ positions far more rigid,” Ms. Weingarten said. “I’ve no doubt that this hearing will have a chilling effect on the ability of the UFT and the [Department of Education] to eventually reach an agreement.”That’s one spin. Another way of seeing things is that the UFT is desperately looking for an excuse not to reach an agreement with the current administration. For the union has concluded that it will have someone more pliable across the table after the next mayoral election. “It’s called waiting for lefty,” an education expert, Sol Stern, told The New York Sun recently. “They have to wait two years….It’s practically out in the open.”

It doesn’t sound to us like a strategy that puts children first. The UFT, however, might not want to put all of its eggs in the anti-Bloomberg basket. In the last mayoral election the UFT endorsed Alan Hevesi, then Fernando Ferrer, then Mark Green — all three losers. The union might do better by getting serious about reforming a contract the flaws of which few deny.

Ms. Weingarten has recently been blaming the Giuliani administration for putting the much-maligned Circular 6 — which exempts teachers from lunchroom and other non-teaching duties — on the table. She may be right that the former mayor made a tactical error, but the union has done nothing to reverse this error. Similarly, Ms. Weingarten professes to grasp the need for differential pay to recruit teachers in shortage areas such as math and science, but her proposals in this area would require the desired teachers to jump through extra hoops.

Some reform-minded critics reckon the Department of Education and Chancellor Klein share some blame in the current situation. Mr. Stern, for example, faults Mr. Klein for not “offering a different vision over the heads of the union leadership to teachers who want to be treated like professionals”and instead “scaring”the teachers “with his totalitarian micromanaging.” Here we confess to some sympathy for Mr. Klein. He ought to be able to fire teachers as he judges fit. If he can’t, he at least ought to be able to tell them what to do. If he can’t either fire them or tell them what to do, then who’s going to represent the people?

The Moskowitz hearings are playing a tremendously important role in throwing this issue into sharp relief. They are a brilliant stroke, and the city is cheering on the committee. But what they are going to accomplish is to leave ever more people wondering why so much drama has to be attached to arguing about the public school system when so much could be settled, and so quickly, by giving poor parents as well as rich ones the choice of sending their children to a better school through a system of educational vouchers.