“Fries with that?” is usually a yes-or-no matter, but on a recent trip to McDonald’s, David Smith took the opportunity to pose a query of his own.

“Are you interested in learning about school choice?” the upstate anesthesiologist says he asked the manager of a McDonald’s in Syracuse after collecting his and his two sons’ orders. One conversation later, Dr. Smith had one more convert for his movement, School Choice New York, a group he is calling a “union of parents.”

The idea, as Dr. Smith has explained to McDonald’s managers, nurses at his hospital, baristas at his local coffee shop, and anyone who happens to notice the large stickers pasted on his silver Honda Pilot (they scream “School Choice”), is to gather together the parents of New York and then take them to Albany to demand a say in the way their schools are run.

Among the policies he and his members say they’d like to see: vouchers that will use public money to pay for private schools, more charter schools, and a better Web site for the state Department of Education.

“There’s only one voice in Albany right now: That’s the voice of the teachers union,” Dr. Smith explained in an interview with The New York Sun. “They don’t have that right. The people that are affected by the system most dramatically — parents and their children — should have the largest voice.” New York teachers unions have denied the charge that they represent the interests of teachers only. A top adviser at the United Federation of Teachers, Leo Casey, argued in a recent magazine article that unions are “major actors” in the mission of improving American education, not just increasing the size of their paychecks.

Groups across the country such as Dr. Smith’s, however, have made a mission of fighting teachers unions on policies such as private school vouchers and non-unionized charter schools. Dr. Smith counts these groups as his examples.

In just three months, Dr. Smith, a Jefferson County resident with three sons in public school, has made big gains for his cause, including 100 members, a contact sheet of national advisers, and two speaking dates — all before the launch of his Web site, which is scheduled for today.

A nurse who works with Dr. Smith, Ruth Powell, said she nicknamed him “F.L.,” for “fearless leader,” to describe his calm in the operating room. Ms. Powell said the name also describes his leadership of the parents union.

Dr. Smith, 44, said he conceived the idea after fighting for years to decipher his son’s troubles in school, only to learn the child had a learning disability the public school had never detected. When he tried to tell public school educators about a method of cognitive therapy some use to help students with his son’s learning disability, sending about 150 e-mail messages in the process, he said he received no responses. Now he is paying $25,000 a year to send his son to a private school in Canada that uses the technique.

Dr. Smith said he has heard similar stories from almost every parent he contacts.

An operating room aide he works with, DeBora Brinson of Watertown, N.Y., sends her daughter to private school to avoid the “horror stories” she hears from friends with children in public schools, where she said she knows several 13-year-olds who cannot read. To cover her daughter’s tuition, she said, she often skips church to work overtime and extra jobs.

Vouchers, a policy Dr. Smith explained to her, sound fantastic, she said.

Ms. Brinston’s pastor, Henry Wallace Jr. of the Gates of Goodness and Mercy Inc. church in Watertown, has also signed onto Dr. Smith’s group. To explain why, he turned to McDonald’s.

“If you go to a fast food store, and the register goes down, I guarantee no one will take another order because of the fact that they don’t know how to count money,” Pastor Wallace said. “They don’t understand the basic math.”

If parents had more control of public education, he said, they would demand better.