The fate of one of Mayor Bloomberg’s key education reforms is now languishing in the hands of legal bureaucrats in the Bush Justice Department.

That’s an irony in itself. You’d think the Bush administration would want to help New York’s Republican mayor and governor in instituting a sweeping overhaul of the creaky and expensive system of community school boards that helped wreck the city’s public schools.

Instead, the civil rights division careerists burrowed in at the Ashcroft Justice Department are delaying giving the Bloomberg plan the speedy approval it deserves. Mr. Ashcroft, who as a senator gave an interview to the neo-confederate magazine Southern Partisan, is in charge of making sure that the plans of Mr. Bloomberg and his school aides — who include Caroline Kennedy and former Clinton Justice Department official Joel Klein — do not unfairly disadvantage minority families.

In a brief filed with the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund challenges the Bloomberg administration’s plan to replace elected Community School Boards with Community District Education Councils.

The brief is cogent, well developed, persuasive and oh so wrongheaded. How soon we seem to forget that the disastrous school decentralization effort that brought us to today’s crisis was born of the same type of identity politics that AALDEF is advocating today. Evaluating the mayor’s reform plans by attempting to predict how many persons of a particular race will be selected for these relatively powerless boards is the wrong approach.

There is no Asian, Latino, black, or white way to fix our schools. There are only efforts that work, which seem to us to have no particular racial approach.

The new councils would, unlike the discredited boards they replace, not be elected by the citizenry at large. Under Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal, council members will be selected by some 3,600 officers of Parent Teacher Associations in New York’s 1,200 public schools, and must themselves be parents. AALDEF cries foul, charging that this will diminish the number of Asian–Americans on the boards.

Three boroughs of our city — The Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn — are covered by the federal Voting Rights Act. This forces us to surrender to the Justice Department control over much of our political process. The reason behind this is the large number of “protected” minorities living in these counties. The law exists under the curious presumption that because significant numbers of people of certain backgrounds live in a particular area, they will automatically be discriminated against.

Never mind the fact that modern New York City has little history of racial discrimination in voting matters. This is the city that sent Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to Congress fully two decades before he voted for the first incarnation of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. A half-century ago, an African-American, Hulan Jack, was elected as Manhattan borough president, a position which then had considerable power, influence, and prestige. Real empowerment took place here even before Rosa Parks refused to leave her seat in the front of that bus in Montgomery, Ala.

Yet New York is subjected to the same kind of scrutiny as the states of the Deep South that methodically prevented black citizens from voting. This interference takes the initiative away from the mayor and the state Legislature and governor duly elected by all voters, and replaces it with the judgment of Washington lawyers, some of whom may never have even set foot in our city.

There’s no denying the value of including parents of all backgrounds in supporting the schools and consulting with educators; in fact, the opportunity to mix and learn from parents and students of a variety of diverse backgrounds is one of the magnificent things about this city’s schools. But these same parents will have the chance to hold the mayor accountable for the results of his reforms just two years from now. Voters of all backgrounds will be able to evaluate the totality of his initiatives and decide either to replace Mr. Bloomberg or to re-elect him. If the Justice Department were reasonable, that would be more than enough to satisfy it.