The true test of any reform is that it sticks. The education secretary, Michael Gove, seems to have failed it. Boldly determined to transform England's schools and defy leftwing teachers, he has made so few friends and so many enemies that the latter are out to smash his achievements. Labour's Tristram Hunt and David Blunkett this week began the demolition. If Labour comes to power, it will end what it regards as England's chaotic control of schools, unevenly divided between Whitehall and local councils.

Both parties share the blame for this confusion. Education secretaries back to Kenneth Baker in the 1980s sought a national school system alongside their nationalisation of universities. They wanted an NSS to parallel the NHS. The idea went off half-cock. For a quarter of a century, Tory and Labour ministers created academies, grant maintained schools, specialist schools, city technology colleges and free schools, spattered across the country, a Whitehall education empire rivalling but always more expensive than local council schools.

Ministers stripped councils of school planning and funding and took these to Whitehall and a battery of new agencies. They prescribed everything from admissions criteria to how to teach history and maths. Blunkett, as education secretary, meddled incessantly, immersing teachers and pupils in cartloads of regulations, tests and targets. By the time the coalition came to power, to build a Whitehall school cost significantly more than a local authority one – over a quarter more.

Gove's personal offering, the "free school", was truly reckless. While allowing it to admit anyone, teach anything and make money at public expense, he imposed on other schools a total dirigisme, writing the curriculum, inducing teachers to "teach to the test" and even "earn the target" through performance pay. It was blatant ideological favouritism. The result has been a mixture of white-flight selectivity and religious fundamentalism. Were it to bed down, the free school would replicate in English cities the sectarian and social divisiveness still experienced in Ulster. This would be a disaster.

There is curiously little evidence that one form of school governance does better or worse than another – the calibre of the head is probably most crucial. Gove has stripped sixth forms of some £45m to pay for his beloved Harris Westminster free school for a mere 500 sixth-formers. Yet one scandal after another has led freedom to wither on the vine. Gove is now setting up eight regional headteacher boards, each with a chancellor to oversee academies and free schools.

All publicly funded institutions should be accountable to someone local. A secretary of state in London is not enough. (I heard no civic leader comment on this week's Leeds stabbing, just Gove and Cameron in London: inconceivable in France or America.) Gove may regard himself as "the man in Whitehall who knows best", but he cannot vet every governor, choose every headteacher, allot every place, revise every curriculum and check every hymn for school assembly in 24,000 schools. Allegations of Muslim entryism in Whitehall's Birmingham schools are being investigated by no fewer than four state agencies.

All this, say Hunt and Blunkett, is becoming Kafka-esque. They duly promise to wipe the slate clean and "rub out the Gove era". So what do they propose instead? The answer is hard to discern. It is a network of new "independent directors of school standards" in each city or "group of local authorities". These would be selected from a "list approved by the secretary of state", with extensive power to intervene in all state schools, whether local council, academy or free, especially after poor Ofsted reports. Such commissioners would be "statutorily responsible" for setting up new schools. They would be locally accountable and embrace "community trusts and incubation zones", thus ending the present regime where schools are "floating free from the communities they serve".

This is mystifying. Why not just return Whitehall's schools to elected local education authorities? These exist. They offer a tried and tested model for local accountability. Where they fall short, they can be inspected by Ofsted and exposed. Most have worked with greater economy than Whitehall's ham-fisted and costly initiatives. Any comparison of England's local education authorities with the NHS in continuous upheaval is entirely in their favour.

All Blunkett and Hunt seem to be doing is inserting another institutional tier between schools and Whitehall. This will have no elected representation, leaving true accountability still with the secretary of state. Money and therefore real control will continue to emanate from Whitehall's education funding agency. Nor is it clear if the new commissioners will vet the most contentious aspect of local schooling: 11-plus admissions criteria.

Blunkett calls all this a "hard-edged delegation of responsibilities", but I cannot see his new commissioners as different in function or power from Gove's new chancellors. Indeed, it looks suspiciously as if government and opposition have been in cahoots on this. Gove should be quietly pleased.

Real, accountable delegation downwards of any local service can only be to elected people – as in most democracies around the world. They need to have proper local tax-raising and distributing powers to match. It is clear that Blunkett and Hunt can no more stomach this than could Cameron and Gove. Labour's hatred for localism, and especially elected localism, is as visceral as that of the Tories.

This is not a party matter; it is professional tribalism. No politician willingly surrenders control downwards. Having once tasted power over education, Blunkett has no intention of giving it back to those he regards as tinpot locals. All else is window-dressing.