There has been a great deal of excitement this week about charter schools. The concept of schools invented from the ground up, run with minimal constraints of centralized control, is certainly attractive. But before we get caught up in irrational exuberance, we ought to look at the hard lessons unfolding in another reform effort, the small school movement, right here in New York City.

For the small-school movement, centered at the high school level, is imploding. Despite overcrowding in all high schools, the supply of seats in the small schools, most of which are organized around specific themes, exceeds demand. That is why last year a third of the seats in the scores of these schools already established in the city were filled by students who hadn’t requested them.

The carving out of the small schools in larger buildings has exacerbated the overcrowding problem overall. There is some evidence that Tweed Courthouse has deliberately favored the small schools in student assignment, dooming any effort to salvage the larger schools, some of which have successfully educated waves of immigrants and minorities for generations. Think Morris High School and Colin Powell.

Before the problems have been solved at the first two waves of small schools created since Mayor Bloomberg won control of the education system, another wave of new schools has been announced and will open in September. I have already written about one of those new schools, the Bronx Leadership Institute High School. It is sponsored by a far-left group, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition.

The purpose of this public school is to promote “social justice.” Its sponsor is the organization that was behind last year’s effort to convince parents to keep their children at home on the day of the third-grade reading test to protest the mayor’s goal of ending social promotion. The president of the group, Ronn Jordan, was the spokesman for this effort.

According to the New York Post, police charge that the Northwest Bronx group had coached students at troubled Walton High School to make up stories about police brutality. Those stories made headlines at a recent public hearing sponsored by Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz. One student alleged that the police set off stink bombs in the hallways of the school to break up groups of students. After an investigation, police charge that the Northwest Bronx group fabricated the story.

This week I learned a new wrinkle to the saga. The Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition has just hired a new executive director, James Mumm. Mr. Mumm is an anarchist. Lest you think that I am engaging in some reckless name-calling, fear not. I am sure that Mr. Mumm is entirely comfortable and proud to be called an anarchist. After all, he identifies himself as such and acknowledges that he has “been active in anarchist circles since the end of the Gulf War.” He is the author of a screed called “Active Revolution,” in which he outlines ways to fight “institutionalized oppressions,” which, in addition to the obligatory racism, sexism, and homophobia, includes that greatest of all evils, capitalism.

Why, you might ask, would an avowed anarchist be so deeply involved in that most bureaucratic of entities, a public school? To recruit and influence children, of course. That this endeavor will be financed by you and me with our dirty capitalist tax dollars makes it all the more delicious. Mr. Mumm suggests that the first step in taking over power is by “locating ourselves in the complex matrix of oppression” so that they can “radicalize people over time.” What better place for such activities than a New York City public school?

Presumably, Mr. Mumm’s essay will be assigned reading at this publicly funded Department of Education school under the direct control of one of our nation’s leading capitalist oppressors, Michael Bloomberg. Does the mayor know what is going on at the Tweed Courthouse?

We are giving the keys to a New York City public schoolhouse to a radical group, a group directed by a self-proclaimed anarchist. It is a group that has already been accused of urging children to lie at a public hearing to increase tensions between students and police, and of urging parents to break the law by keeping their children home from school. It is time for this situation to be taken in hand. The plug needs to be pulled on this school and a number of others with political or so-called community activist orientations. It is not the place of the school system to indoctrinate children politically.