Dedication Dies at the Blackboard : SMALL VICTORIES The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students & Their High School <i> by Samuel G. Freedman (Harper & Row: $22.95; 416 pp.; 0-06-016254-6) </i>

Turn a few pages of this remarkably vivid portrait of a New York City high school and you can almost smell the fluid of an overworked mimeograph machine, hear the dissonance of Asian and Latin American accents and feel the latest headache gathering force in the curly head of the book’s heroine, English and journalism teacher Jessica Siegel, an educator who cared so much for her students that she finally had to choose between them and herself.

There may be a few books that better address the broader issues of American education, but none I have read provide such a multilayered, personal, galvanizing account of what it is like to teach in a seriously troubled school. Samuel G. Freedman, a former New York Times reporter with a masterful command of detail, obtained enviable access to Seward Park High during the 1987-88 academic year and uses it to take us into an emotional labyrinth.

It being torture enough to have to teach in the New York city schools and care about the result, will anyone want to read about it? I think so. It is difficult to resist the story of Siegel’s struggles in her last year of trying to keep an award-winning student newspaper alive, while making F. Scott Fitzgerald enlightening to farm kids from the Dominican Republic and Guangdong Province. The dramatic possibilities are not lost on Hollywood; 20th Century-Fox optioned the book long before its publication.

Like many of the best educators in today’s public schools, Siegel, a doctor’s daughter from New Milford, N.J., wandered into teaching after dabbling in another career--journalism. She had worked for the student newspaper at the University of Chicago and tried the frenetic, poverty-stricken life of a Liberation News Service reporter before taking her energy and social consciousness to Seward Park in the Lower East Side. Freedman discovered her after she wrote him a letter complimenting him on one of his stories. With the assent of Seward Park principal Noel N. Kriftcher the teacher and the journalist hatched a plot to expose the darkest corners of a high school teacher’s world.

Freedman calls Siegel a “fiercely private” person, but she seems to have opened herself very wide here. She betrays both her frustrations with the social and emotional problems of her students and the school bureaucracy, and some more delicate personal matters, such as her carefully monitored affection for a married colleague and her need to take an occasional sick day just to be able to catch up with her paper work.

The demands of her raging ambition--not shared by many other faculty members--to pull her students out of filthy streets and fractured families and into colleges and careers take every minute of her day. She grows frantic at the number of students who resist her efforts.

What does she do about Mary Tam, who received a perfect “100 on her autobiography, 95 on her book report on ‘Ethan Frome,’ 90 on a test on Indian and Puritan literature, 90 on a surprise quiz on Thoreau” and yet “missed every other examination and all but three of 28 homework assignments”? The student’s autobiography, brilliant as it was, had “intimations of suicide.” Would Siegel, who had fashioned a classroom persona as a “tough cookie,” be the one to push one more child over the edge?

The staff of the Seward World, the newspaper that brought her and the school some unusual recognition, has difficulty even finding a room for an occasional meeting. Some of the paper’s funds come out of Siegel’s pocket. She has had to finesse a growing set of insane district rules to ensure that it is printed correctly and cheaply. In one painful episode, she begs for the $2,000 needed to print the year’s last issue.

In the end, Siegel decides to leave teaching and try journalism again. “I’m really tired,” she tells her closest friend on the faculty. “I work all the time. I have no life . . . and I just can’t take it any more.”

Freedman seems intent on sticking close to Siegel, plus a few of her more interesting colleagues and students whose stories he sometimes travels halfway around the world to tell. He makes few attempts to link what he sees to any of the several debates over theory and practice now raging in Washington and in the universities, the teachers unions and the offices of governors and state school superintendents. But even so unadorned, his vignettes suggest real trouble for some of the most popular of the current educational fads.

Siegel has to violate New York’s “equalization” policy to keep a bright Hispanic youth, whose fragile self-esteem she has built to a critical point, from being transferred out of her class. This well-meaning rule, a result of the current emphasis on lowering class sizes, says she cannot have more than 34 students in any period. In practice, it threatens to ruin years of work making certain children secure in an often hostile high school environment.

In perhaps the most depressing--and yet fascinating--episode in the book, Siegel unsuccessfully begs for $3,000 for a copying machine so that teachers no longer have to spend hours typing stencils. Other members of the English department insist on spending the money on video-cassette recorders and television sets. This is their decision under one of the “teacher-empowerment” programs that have become so popular lately and have altered the management of every public school in Los Angeles under a new union contract negotiated last year.

“The question of why teachers of English would rely so heavily on a visual medium was never broached,” Freedman said of the television and VCR purchase: “This faction’s most persuasive argument was its leadership,” most notably “Judy Goldman, a reading teacher who served as the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) chapter chairwoman at Seward Park, and as such wielded more power in school than anyone except the principal.”

As rich and compelling as Siegel’s story is, it leaves a thirst for a longer look at where public schools in New York are going and how well Seward Park’s care-ridden classrooms match the picture of educational crisis we hear about in campaign speeches and on editorial pages. In his introduction, Freedman describes the falling SAT scores, low teacher salaries and widespread illiteracy that produced an avalanche of reform proposals in the early 1980s, then notes that “none of these trends was new. Not even the perception of crisis was new. In every generation or so, it seemed, America had indulged itself in a spasm of conscience about the state of the public schools.”

Perhaps a writer this talented, no matter how weary from a nerve-rasping year at Seward Park, has enough energy for another book that will tell us more about what we can change in our approach to learning. Can we keep the Jessica Siegels in the schools, or must this generation, like all the previous ones, resign itself to muddling through, ignoring the prophets of doom and the latest presidential commission?