If Mayor Bloomberg was serious when he said that he wanted to be held accountable for the results of the reform of New York City’s schools, he may have good reason to worry. Though it is early yet, the indications are hardly promising. The two main prongs of the reforms being implemented by the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, formerly a trustbuster, are a uniform curriculum and reorganization. Neither has met a better than chilly reception.

The entire concept of a uniform curriculum has never seemed a better than break-even idea. Consistency for children and teachers moving from school to school has its value. At the same time, one poor choice by a central bureaucracy can set back the education of a generation of New York City schoolchildren. As our columnist Andrew Wolf has documented in these pages, plenty of people think the administration bungled its choice of Month-by-Month Phonics for the reading curriculum, including the esteemed educational historian Diane Ravitch and President Bush’s top reading adviser, Reid Lyon. The reading program has drawn so much criticism that Mr. Klein last week adopted a supplemental program, New York City Passport, for children struggling with reading. The mathematics curriculum, Everyday Mathematics, has also drawn its share of criticism from those who see it is as a progressive, or “fuzzy,” math program.

The plan to reorganize the current 32 school districts into 10 regions has met no warmer a reception. Aside from the simple question posed with respect to the plan — how exactly are 10 regional superintendents supervising 100 “instructional supervisors” better than the current system? — it is politically tone-deaf. Trying to kill off the local school districts and school boards, making the school system seem less accessible, was never likely to win many converts. And it has created enemies in the state Legislature, such as Senator Frank Padavan, who last week grilled the chancellor at a forum in Brooklyn.

The level of grousing that has been voiced no doubt should be expected from any significant reform of the school system. A large bureaucracy breeds entrenched interests, and those interests will make a lot of noise when their world is turned upside down. What troubles people is the extent to which it appears that all of this argument is for naught. Centralize what’s decentralized, decentralize what’s centralized — it starts to seem a substance-free credo. How much can the schools improve when the bureaucracy remains unaccountable — aside from Mr. Bloomberg, who has tied his fate to it — and students remain stuck in the system?

While no one is hoping that Albany will step back in and end this experiment, we can’t help but think how much more worthwhile it all would be if true experimentation were taking place. Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein have given little more than lip service to the use of charter schools. Last October, Mr. Klein said, “Charters can stimulate innovation in a system and create opportunities for choice…We need to create an environment in which charter schools can be supported and thrive.” No new support for the schools has been forthcoming.

Meantime, they have given the cold shoulder to the concept of parental choice that is inherent in the vouchers movement. Mr. Klein called them a “sadly mistaken hypothesis” for curing what ails our schools, ignoring the core issue, which is parental choice — an exceptionally odd reaction from a famed trustbuster. Both vouchers and charter schools would be the logical spur to competition and improved performance.

Vouchers got a huge boost from the Supreme Court last summer, and they are making huge political gains in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana. New York is a long way from seeing such progress — especially with the anti-Catholic Blaine Amendment barring state money from coming into contact with religious schools — but the battle will start somewhere. These arguments about curriculum, which are emanating from homes in Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island and the Upper East Side and Harlem as parents choose to which school to send their children, are an early warning to Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein that there will eventually be the accounting the mayor insists he wants.