COLUMN ONE : Schools Put to Bold Test in N.Y. : Joe Fernandez dropped out of high school. Now as chancellor, he has set out to turn around the nation’s largest public school system.

Back in the early 1950s, the New York City school system failed with Joe Fernandez. Or maybe it was the other way around.

There were probably teachers who tried to reach him, but none made much of an impression. Of all of them, he can remember only one by name: Mrs. Brown from third grade, who took him on his first trip to a museum.

As a teen-ager in East Harlem, he hung out with a gang that called itself the Riffs. Afternoons would find them cutting class and sneaking into the Paramount Theater on 42nd Street. They experimented with drugs and got into fights. Some of Joe’s friends ended up in jail.

At 17, Joe saw what lay ahead of him in Harlem, and decided he had to escape. He quit school over his parents’ objections and joined the Air Force.

Almost 40 years later, this high-school dropout has returned to New York hoping to turn around a troubled educational program that is awash in scandal and literally falling apart. In January, Joseph A. Fernandez, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants, became chancellor of the nation’s largest public school system.

Fernandez earned his high-school equivalency certificate while in the service, and ultimately received a doctorate. But his is hardly the path he wants to see others follow. “I often get concerned when people say you’re a real role model for the kids,” he joked.

With only two years experience at the helm of the Dade County school system in Florida, Fernandez is now asking New York to take a bold gamble on his brand of school management--an approach that seems promising, but thus far has had mixed results in Miami.

Educators across the nation are watching closely to see if Fernandez can pull it off.

“He’s the most interesting guy out there. There’s a lot riding on him,” says Robert A. Hochstein of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. “If two or three years down the road you look at New York and there’s real progress in terms of academic performance, that’s a powerful model for urban America. There just aren’t very many examples across the United States of an urban superintendent who’s really cracked this nut.”

In only two months on the job as chancellor, the tough-talking, 54-year-old Fernandez has kept his promise to “hit the streets running.” A tall, stout man with a ready laugh, he speaks with an unmistakable New York accent, despite his decades away.

“You’re going to love me, or you’re going to hate me, because I intend to stir the pot,” he warned shortly before he took over.

The heart of his plan is to make a radical change in the way schools are run here. Fernandez wants to give parents, teachers and principals the ability to decide what and how their children should be taught.

The trade-off for this increased power, however, is making schools more accountable, even taking them over when they fail, he says.

Already, Fernandez has suspended two principals, removed one superintendent and blocked a local school board from appointing another. He has called individual principals to task for such infractions as failing to get rid of graffiti on their schools. Further, he is asking the state Legislature to give him far greater ability to hire, fire and transfer school officials.

Chief among his likely adversaries are the 32 independent community school boards that tenaciously guard their patronage over elementary and middle schools. His proposals also challenge a central administration bureaucracy of more than 5,000 people, and unions that represent everyone from principals to crossing guards.

Thus far, momentum and public sentiment seem to be on his side. “I don’t remember in my adulthood any individual who has captured the imagination and respect of New York City as you have,” Harlem Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) told Fernandez at a recent public appearance.

Felix G. Rohatyn, one of the most influential members of the city’s business community, initially supported another candidate for the chancellor’s job, but he now contends that Fernandez is “the best thing to happen to New York in 20 years.”

“He’s on absolutely the right track,” added teachers union President Sandra Feldman, who has been an adversary of chancellors in the past.

However other chancellors, too, have ridden into town on a wave of good feeling, only to see it evaporate in the face of day-to-day reality.

New York’s 983 schools are petri dishes for all of urban America’s social ills--drugs, homelessness, violence, broken homes. The dropout rate among the system’s 937,000 students approaches one-third, and on a typical day 150,000 are absent. When the state singled out its 43 most troubled schools last year, 39 were in New York City.

After 15 years of neglect, the schools have a $500-million maintenance backlog. Hundreds of classrooms--sometimes entire floors of a school--are burned out, or too leaky to be usable. That leaves the system with 96,000 seats less than it needs for its students, and some classes meet in broom closets, hallways, even bathrooms.

Fernandez was appalled to discover that New York, with more than three times as many schools as Miami, has the same number of maintenance workers. When the chancellor asked that his dirty office windows be cleaned, he was told that the engineers’ contract allows it only once a year. He was also informed that it would take four weeks to fill his request for yellow highlighting pens.

Fernandez confronted many of those problems, on a smaller scale, in Miami’s public schools, where he had started as a high school math teacher in 1963 and worked his way up to superintendent 24 years later. He got the job when Supt. Leonard M. Britton moved on in 1987 to take over as head of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“Joe has a big ego. His ego is as big as the world, but he has the charisma to pull it off,” said Holmes Braddock, a Dade County School Board member who has known Fernandez since the mid-1960s.

Fernandez built on Britton’s work in Miami to put in place a nationally acclaimed system that he plans to use as the model for New York. The idea, one that is being tried to various degrees in cities around the country, is called “school-based management/ shared decision-making”--buzzwords that Fernandez repeats like a mantra in every public appearance.

Several weeks ago, to a cheering audience of 2,000 teachers and administrators in Manhattan, he explained the concept this way: “I don’t know what your kids need. The central board doesn’t know what your kids need. You know what your kids need, because you are in there with them every day.”

“It was phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal, to finally be treated like a professional,” said Renee Rosenblum-Lowden, a veteran teacher in the New York system.

During Fernandez’s stint as Miami superintendent, more than half the Dade County schools switched to school-based management, setting up a governing committee that includes teachers, parents, the principal and, in some cases, clerical and custodial workers.

They have used their new authority and freedom to strike out in different directions.

One school, dissatisfied with its in-house foreign language program, contracted out for a Berlitz instructor. Another eliminated the pay supplements some teachers got for extra duties, and used the funds to hire someone to be there at 7 a.m., when many parents were dropping off their kids.

Some schools put students in uniforms; others started Saturday classes and evening sessions for working students. Four schools have done away with the position of assistant principal and applied the money they saved to extracurricular activities and supplies.

While Fernandez encouraged this type of innovation, he was also very demanding. He once demoted an elementary school principal on the spot when he found a building too dirty for the third year in a row.

“His whole approach to education is very caring and nurturing toward students, also toward teachers and administrators--as long as they are producing,” said Janet McAliley, a member of the Dade County School Board. “But he can also be really hard on people.”

His detractors go even further. “The guy is very vindictive. He rules by terror,” says Brian Peterson, an associate professor of history at Florida International University who has written reports criticizing Miami schools.

Few will deny that the Dade County system has a new energy and optimism. Where it used to have only two applicants for every available teaching job, it can now choose from nine. Student dropout rates have fallen slightly as well.

However, some teachers claim that morale is falling because school-based management is cumbersome and takes them out of the classroom too much.

More disturbing, it thus far has failed to move the schools toward their most basic mission, better learning. In fact, achievement test scores have gone down, although some have attributed this to an influx of 14,000 more students, most of them Nicaraguan refugees.

“The jury is out,” McAliley said. “Our test scores do not look good. Whether you can blame that on school-based management, who knows?”

The results of the Miami experiment may not be known for years, and this bothers some in New York. “Why should we use our kids as guinea pigs when we have programs in the system that are workable and doable and should be replicated?” demanded Philip Kaplan, executive director of the New York City School Boards Assn.

New York lured Fernandez with a $195,000 salary, plus pension and benefits estimated to be worth more than twice that much. Part of the deal was the promise of a rent-free house. Fernandez and his wife, Lily, initially decided on a $990,000 two-story home on Staten Island, but since have decided they want to live near the school district headquarters in Brooklyn Heights.

He fills a seat left vacant last year by the death of Richard R. Green, another chancellor who had shown great promise but who spent only 14 months in the job. The differences in their styles are dramatic: Where Green spent his first days in office quietly learning the system from the inside, Fernandez held more than 160 highly publicized meetings with community leaders and school officials before he even started on the job.

Green lost some credibility early on when Matthew Barnwell, a Bronx elementary school principal, was arrested for cocaine possession. Although Barnwell had a history of tardiness and alcohol abuse, Green appealed for public sympathy and persisted in a presumption of innocence. The community school board that hired Barnwell was suspended in 1988 and the former principal was convicted two months ago.

Fernandez seems to have decided not to make that same mistake. When a gym teacher was promised probation on a cocaine-possession charge, Fernandez wrote the judge and demanded a jail term. Last week, Fernandez and the board of education proposed drug tests for the school district’s 120,000 employees.

Already, he has become such a familiar figure in New York that the tabloid headlines refer to him simply as “Joe.” But the first real test of his clout is coming soon, as he presses his politically explosive agenda with the state Legislature.

Not only does Fernandez want more funding from lawmakers who already are facing a major fiscal squeeze, he is asking them to give him far more power by:

--Abolishing “building tenure,” the policy that makes it next to impossible to transfer a principal from a school against his will.

--Disbanding the Board of Examiners that tests and licenses teachers, which critics say is superfluous since New York started requiring teachers to take a national test.

--Giving the chancellor a virtual veto over the hiring of district superintendents by New York’s 32 community school boards.

Those boards were established after a bitter teachers strike in 1968. Ironically enough, their initial purpose was the same as the dogma that Fernandez espouses--giving communities more say-so over how their schools are run.

Any move to chip away at local school board authority is likely to mean racial tension. Part of the reason for establishing them was to give the minority community more input into a school system where 80% of the students are black or Latino, and 70% of the teachers and administrators are white.

In recent years, however, many of these boards have been at the center of a series of corruption scandals.

“The local boards are the last vestiges of the old political clubs,” Fernandez contended. “A tremendous amount of patronage and nepotism takes place on many of these boards--not all of them certainly, but a lot of them.

“Let me give you a score card of my first six weeks,” he continued. “I had to stop a local board from reappointing a district superintendent who is under indictment by the D.A. I had to order a local board to fire a district superintendent who stole special education money to furnish her office. I had to order a local board not to reappoint a principal who had stolen $20,000 worth of welfare money.”

And it does not end there, Fernandez said, his voice rising. “I had to order a board to dismiss a principal who had hired a known child abuser (as a teacher). I had to tell a local board not to hire a district superintendent who had done a terrible job as a principal.”

Some of those moves, his critics say, went further than the law allows, and that is why Fernandez is asking the Legislature to rewrite the statutes.

But Kaplan, the school boards association director, says the local boards are becoming the scapegoats of a chancellor who has “a need to make some headlines.”

“He’s right to move,” said Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, who started her own political career on a local school board. “There’s an incredible amount of dirty bath water, but he has to be sure he doesn’t throw out the baby. He’s got to be really careful.”

Nor are the principals happy with Fernandez’s proposal to eliminate their tenure to buildings. “He talks about shared decision-making, but he doesn’t always practice it,” said Donald Singer, who is president of the union representing principals.

The principals see building tenure as an important safeguard against political shenanigans, but Fernandez insists that it too often protects incompetence. In Miami, he shuffled the assignments of 48 of the school system’s 285 principals. Moving a principal in New York requires a hearing process that averages 64 weeks. It has been used on only eight of the city’s more than 1,000 principals since 1979, and none were removed.

His critics say Fernandez has thus far shown New York little more than his political muscle. “Instead of dealing with the quality of life in our schools, the education of our children, reading and writing, he’s dealing with governance,” Kaplan complained.

Fernandez promised: “Once we get past all these governance discussions and political considerations, we can start dealing with the real issue, which is improving the quality of the programs and the quality of the educational system for the children.

“You need three or four years,” he added. “We can’t forget what it’s all about, and it’s the kids.” New York may not give him that long to produce solid results, but for now, it appears that Fernandez has the city on his side.

A few weeks ago, a bus driver honked his horn at the taxi that was carrying Fernandez. “Hey, Hernandez,” the driver yelled. “No, Fernandez,” the chancellor corrected him.

“Right,” the driver said. “Give ‘em hell!”