A new educational advocacy group seeking to repair one of the largest and most peculiar disconnects in current American politics announced itself in Washington yesterday.

The Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), headed by former Milwaukee superintendent of schools Howard Fuller, intends to provide a national voice for the overwhelming majority of African American parents who tell pollsters they favor more educational options for low-income parents.

This is a task of which the civil rights establishment clearly wants no part.

The NAACP, the congressional black caucus and the leading organization of black educators have all lined up monolithically against tuition vouchers, charter schools, tax credits for K-12 education expenses, public-private ventures to operate schools, home schooling and all the other "options" Fuller's group wants to have considered.

This orthodoxy is strictly enforced. One member of BAEO's 29-member board, Willie H. Breazell, had been head of the NAACP chapter in Colorado Springs — until he expressed support for school choice. He was ousted.

Only a few nationally known black political leaders — most notably Colin Powell, former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young and Urban League president Hugh Price — have dared to defy the decree of omerta on school choice.

Meanwhile, the level of support for a wider array of choices in education for low-income parents, most notably through tuition vouchers, has grown to a level approaching overwhelming. While overall support for school choice hovers just above 50 percent in most polls, support among blacks tops 60 percent and can break 70 percent for African Americans with school-age children.

Why, then, are mainstream civil rights groups so reluctant? Possibly because black politicians depend on teachers'-union campaign contributions, along with the willingness of blacks to vote for politicians who protect the educational status quo.

These hesitant leaders know that public schools have been an avenue through which many blacks have moved into the middle class as teachers or administrators.

Or, as some have claimed, maybe it is simply a tradition for black legislators to function as an auxiliary of the White Liberal Establishment, which opposes any change in public education (except spending more money on it).

Fuller, however, said he had no intention of "denigrating" black organizations who take a different point of view, or of influencing the presidential race, in which it could be argued that the Republican candidate, George Bush, seems more open to the kind of innovations Fuller's group wants than Al Gore.

But Fuller did make clear that he saw improved education options for low-income blacks as the new "civil rights struggle for our people."

He began his remarks by citing the custom among Masai warriors in Africa to greet one another with the question, "And how are the children? " The polite response is to say that "all the children are well," but American blacks, Fuller said, "cannot honestly say that all the children are well."

He then rattled off the oft-repeated statistics on black educational underperformance, and he made the case that not only are black parents who have choices about where their kids go to school significantly more satisfied, but also their children's achievement is improved.

His organization, he promised, will use national advertisements to argue for tuition vouchers and other programs, while spreading the word about how to bring these changes about through local chapters to be formed in dozens of cities. Philadelphia is expected to have one of the largest, led by State Rep. Dwight Evans, who is on the BAEO board.

"We are going to have a confrontation over who's going to control our children's education," Fuller said, "and our people want freedom."