It has been a good year for the president of the city teachers union — so good that education watchers say Randi Weingarten may soon be leaving New York to become the president of the national teachers union.

After negotiating a rarity — an early contract with no givebacks and significant raises for teachers, who overwhelmingly approved it last week — Ms. Weingarten will probably sail to reelection this spring as president of the city union, the United Federation of Teachers. Experts say she may be campaigning locally with an eye on running to replace the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Edward McElroy, in that union’s 2008 election.

“She’s been groomed for this from the very beginning,” a researcher who runs the Education Intelligence Agency, Michael Antonucci, said. “He’s old and Randi is young — it’s just a matter of time. When he decides to step down, she’ll step up.”

Speculation that she might be headed to Washington, D.C., to lead the national union first began in 2004, after the death of Sandra Feldman, a former president of the UFT whom Ms. Weingarten replaced in 1998. After leaving the UFT, Feldman led the national union until a year before her death, and some people thought Ms. Weingarten would move immediately to replace her.

“She’s the natural heir-apparent for the national union,” an education writer who has written a book about school unions and bureaucracies, Joe Williams, said. “It could have been Randi then … that seat is just sort of waiting there for her.”

Others, like Mr. Antonucci, said the union’s leaders calculated that Ms. Weingarten was too inexperienced to take over the national union in 2004, so Mr. McElroy, then the secretary-treasurer, was elected as a placeholder until she was ready. He added, however, that he thinks if Mr. McElroy decides to stay, Ms. Weingarten probably wouldn’t run.

“The job is his as long as he wants it,” he said. “I really, really doubt there would be any kind of contested election.”

A national union spokeswoman, Janet Bass, said there had been no discussion either way about whether Mr. McElroy, who was re-elected this summer, would run again in 2008.

In many ways, the stars have aligned this year for Ms. Weingarten if she does have national ambitions. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, of which she is a leader, recently ended, with the court settling on a minimum of $2 billion extra in operating aid for New York City schools. The decision, which has garnered national attention, could mean progress on demands such as smaller class sizes, for which Ms. Weingarten has fought relentlessly during her tenure. And, though union elections are rarely competitive because divisive contests can weaken member unity, the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, Tom Mooney, had been considered Ms. Weingarten’s potential rival for the national post until he died of a heart attack this month.

When asked, Ms. Weingarten brushed off questions about whether she will run Hillary Clinton–style: without denying that she might.

“This is not a new rumor; it surfaced when Sandy Feldman died, and has surfaced again now that Tom Mooney has died, and because I just went on a trip to Israel with other AFT leaders,” she said. “Ed McElroy has been a good president and he will continue to be the president of the AFT for as long as he wants to be.”

Some education watchers worry that if she shifts her energy toward a national campaign, she may pay less attention to New York.

“When there is the likelihood of running for higher office, everything supported and everything opposed back at home must be viewed through the prism of that ambition and that next campaign,” the executive director of TEACH NYS, a coalition of religious leaders, Michael Tobman, said.

A labor expert and editor of the Chief-Leader, a weekly newspaper for civil employees, Richard Steier, dismissed such concerns.

“It’s not like you have to modify your stance on abortion for a national audience. I don’t know that she would do anything differently,” he said.

Ms. Weingarten is adamant that her attention is on New York.

“I’m running for re-election as UFT president,” she said. “I have more to do here in New York, and I will devote myself to doing those things.”