If Mayor Bloomberg is wondering why he is attracting so much opposition in the middle-class neighborhoods from which he drew his strongest support, and even from within his own Republican Party, he should take a look at some of the new “small” schools that are being established by the Department of Education. Many of these schools have radical left-wing themes and agendas, in and of itself inappropriate. And one new school in the Bronx takes it a step further.

That is the new Leadership Institute High School, to be created by September at the Fordham section of the Bronx. The sponsor of the school is a radical group, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, which has been especially antagonistic to the Bloomberg administration.

Its members oppose the mayor’s plan to build a federally mandated water-filtration plant at Van Cortlandt Park. They oppose the mayor’s policies on the homeless. They are against all economic development plans, lambasting them as “corporate welfare,” and they suggested that the mayor was facilitating the murder of children through his opposition to the law on lead paint.

Last spring, the Coalition even led a highly publicized boycott of the third grade reading test to underscore their fierce opposition to the mayor’s policy on “social promotion.”

Yet the Department of Education has allowed that group, these unyielding opponents of the mayor and his policies, to design and run a new high school seemingly designed to train foot soldiers in their never-ending war against the oppressor class – which means you and me and, yes, even you, Mr. Mayor.

The description of the Leadership Institute in the just-issued supplementary directory of new small schools makes that clear. The purpose of the school is to train “youth to be leaders who take charge of their schools and communities, it says, adding: “Yearly Community Action Projects give students the skills they need to take action in their communities. A focus on social justice helps students understand their rights in a fair democratic society.” As an afterthought, it also promises “an excellent education.”

As a warning to those who may wander into the school by accident, or perhaps lose interest in the theme along the way, participation in these very political “Community Action Projects” is “required for graduation.” No mention is made of passing five Regents exams.

The Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition was founded in the early 1970s on the principles of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago-based guru of radical community organizers. Alinsky believed that to organize, you need to achieve “friction.” In the real world, that means pitting one group or one community against another.

The Alinsky way is to look at neighborhoods, identify the ones whose residents can rub two nickels together, and then pronounce them as the privileged “enemy.” If such a community includes white faces, so much the better. That is why the Northwest Bronx Coalition spent the better part of the past decade creating “friction” over school issues between supposedly “affluent” Riverdale and surrounding, largely minority communities.

For the beleaguered Riverdale community, that the Bloomberg administration is rewarding the Coalition with its own high school is particularly ironic and infuriating.

When a huge grassroots movement in Riverdale sought to restructure a once failing middle school to include a high school component in the late 1990s, the Coalition launched a five-year, no-holds barred offensive to thwart those plans. Presumably, the 400 or so students who will ultimately attend the Coalition’s Leadership Institute will be enlisted to provide the shock troops in the next organizing effort to create “friction” between Riverdale – in truth, a very diverse, but also very middle-class, community – and the “downtrodden masses” surrounding it.

That Riverdale is the only community in the vicinity that supported Mr. Bloomberg’s election, and that continued support of communities like Riverdale – which has voted Republican in the last four mayoral elections – is vital to his ability to keep his job, is a detail that seems to escape Mr. Bloomberg and his advisers.

The Leadership Institute isn’t the first school with that kind of theme, and may not be the last. The question is whether such a politically motivated public school is appropriate, and whether clear judgment is being exercised when dubious proposals such as the Coalition’s are evaluated by the Bloomberg Department of Education.