Wielding school desegregation decrees that often are many decades old, Mr. Lee  has launched a campaign to stop charter schools in their tracks. His actions put him provocatively at odds both with the goals of desegregation and the Clinton administration’s official education policy.

Charter schools are break-the-mold public schools, freed from most bureaucratic restraints, that tend to serve largely minority-student populations - also the supposed beneficiaries of desegregation decrees. President Clinton backs charter schools as an alternative to vouchers for private schools, going so far as to predict that “the only way public schools can survive . . . is if all of our schools are eventually run like. . . charter schools.”

Neither law nor policy deters Mr. Lee, who is waging the battle against charter schools with the same ideological zeal with which he fought for forced busing and racial balance in public schools as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

The main battleground is Louisiana. In East Baton Rouge, a group called Children’s Charter won local approval to open United Charter School last year to offer an alternative for 650 at-risk children. Residents Estella and Winfield Percy welcorned the school for their academically troubled sons. “It’s a very structured environment,” explained Mrs. Percy, “and it’s something our kids need.”

But the Civil Rights Division went to court to halt United Charter School from opening. Longstanding desegregation orders require all public schools to be within 15 percentage points of the district’s 65% black student population and United Charter School agreed to those racial parameters. But some of the district’s other public schools are more than 95% black, and Justice Department officials. apparently fear that the charter school will siphon some of the few white students - a dubious proposition given that the new school will be located in a black neighborhood.

But no one knows the division’s reasoning for sure, because it refuses to explain itself. One frustrated member of the charter school committee took a photo of a blackboard after a meeting with Justice Department officials in order to finally record something in writing. The division opposed the school’s motion to intervene in the desegregation case, and has urged the trial court to postpone consideration until it would be too late for the school to open next fall.

The division’s actions to prevent a company called SABIS International from opening a charter school in St. Helena Parish are even more mystifying. The school district is 91% black and has only one elemen- tary school, one junior high, and one high school, making it definitionally impossible to racially balance. Moreover, the charter school agreed that more than 90% of its students would be academically at risk.

Again Mr. Lee’s Civil Rights Division objected, apparently believing that the charter school would draw white students who attend private schools in the suburbs. Of course, attracting white students to the overwhelmingly black school district would aid, not inhibit, desegregation. Even if the goals of desegregation are furthered, Mr. Lee apparently is inherently suspicious of any measure that takes power out of the hands of the courts and puts it into the hands of parents.

The division also supported an effort to shut down the New Vision Charter School in Monroe, but federal Judge F.A. Little Jr. refused to go along. Statewide, the division has demanded racial statistics as a precondition for approving any charter schools. But how can a school that doesn’t yet exist provide such data? As Gov. Mike Foster has pointed out, exact demographics are impossible until students enroll and staff are hired. Without approval, that process cannot commence, thereby creating precisely the Catch-22 the Civil Rights Division clearly intends.

“There are a lot of desegregation orders in Louisiana, and the charter law is at risk,” remarks Children’s Charter board member Rolfe McCollister. “If the final say belongs to a guy from Washington, D.C., we’re in trouble.”

And not just in Louisiana. These early skirmishes have nationwide ramifications: more than 500 school districts remain subject to court desegregation orders: many of them in large cities and heavily minority school districts that desperately need educational opportunities.

Another battleground is South Carolina, where the Civil Rights Division put a stop last November to a school district’s efforts to convert certain schools to charter schools. The division ordered the school district to maintain existing schools and attendance zones, period. The charter schools’ impact on racial balance and educational opportunities wasn’t even considered.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lee’s opposite number in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, Norma Cantu, has been using the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to challenge charter schools. Between Mr. Lee and Ms. Cantu, the concept of charter schools, predicated upon freedom from stifling state and local controls, could perish beneath the federal regulatory hammer. Ironically, such efforts to stifle charter schools could drive more education reformers to embrace vouchers for private schools.

Mr. Clinton has just submitted Bill’ Lann Lee’s nomination to the Senate Judiciary Committee for a third time. He still must persuade Senate Republicans why they should support a civil rights law- enforcement official who refuses to abide by the Supreme Court’s precedents on racial preferences. Now the president also must convince pro-charter school Democrats to support an official who is wield- ing the nation’s civil rights arsenal to wreak havoc upon this vital public school reform.

Meanwhile, the East Baton Rouge school system toils under its 43rd year of federal judicial control. Some of the original plaintiff schoolchildren now are 60 years old. How sad that their grandchildren still are denied educational opportunities - and how perverse that the deprivation is visited upon them by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Mr. Bolick is litigation director of the Institutefor Justice in Washington D.C., and author of “Transformation: The Promise and Politics of Empowerment” (1998, ICS Press).