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Believe it or not, there are just four months before the city’s mayoral election, and tonight the three declared candidates will take questions from a group whose endorsement is still outstanding.

Tonight’s Working Families Party forum isn’t a debate, per Mayor Bloomberg’s refusal to debate his two challengers, Democrats William Thompson Jr., the comptroller, and City Councilman Tony Avella. Instead, the candidates will each answer the same seven questions, of which one is about the city schools:

The question alludes to the recent Center for New York City Affairs report that showed that some large high schools suffered as the city opened more small schools.

The Working Families Party hasn’t yet endorsed a candidate, which Elizabeth Benjamin at the Daily News says doesn’t bode well for Thompson. (The teachers’ union is a major financial backer of WFP; in a recent gift, the union sent $20,000 to the party in February 2008.) Tonight’s forum could be a deciding factor in whom the party endorses. Watch the forum online here starting at 5:30 p.m.

At CityRoom, Jonathan Hicks reports that labor groups are vowing to “take aim at” City Council members who support the term limits revision in today’s vote. At the center of Hicks’ post is the Working Families Party, the political party that is backed mainly by labor unions. He quotes the party’s executive director:

“Voting against democracy by extending term limits without a public referendum will weigh pretty heavily when the Working Families Party makes Council endorsements next year,” said Dan Cantor, the executive director of the party. “There’s every indication it will weigh just as heavy with voters when they go to the polls.”

Hicks also includes the United Federation of Teachers in the list of labor groups.

Will the UFT really do that? We know the teachers union is against the mayor’s plan, but president Randi Weingarten was clear that she is not making fighting it a priority. The idea is to save up political capital for a likely budget fight.

But we also know that the UFT sends substantial financial support to the Working Families Party, the group leading the crusade against the mayor’s term limits plan. The union sent more than $100,000 to the Working Families between January and July of this year, far more than it gave to any other group, according to a financial disclosure report filed in July and available here. The gifts came in four installments that can be easily located on that PDF — just scan for the highest dollar amounts in the column, and you have it.

Somehow this slipped between the cracks: The United Federation of Teachers is signing on to a letter urging the Department of Education to make dramatic cuts to at least five of Chancellor Joel Klein’s hallmark programs. Joining the signatories list — which also includes Time Out From Testing, the Working Families Party, and Class Size Matters — was the third thing the union decided to do Wednesday evening at its delegate assembly meeting, right after two higher-profile votes.

On the chopping board would be the annual letter-grade progress reports for schools; the quality reviews that supplement the test-driven progress reports with observed details; all standardized tests for children between kindergarten and second grade; the Leadership Academy, the nonprofit organization that trains principals; the periodic assessments that are supposed to help teachers prepare students for state tests; and ARIS, the data warehousing program contracted to IBM that has so far been a flop.

That’s not the entire Joel Klein agenda. But it’s a lot.