Urban Pittsburgh Schools at Head of Their Class : Education: Many other big-city systems are mired in low achievement. They look with envy at a district that has experienced a scholarly renaissance.

When Pittsburgh School Board President Barbara Burns attended a recent meeting of the Council of Great City Schools, a colleague from Seattle told her that he hoped she was not going to recount any more success stories.

Ever since a group of Seattle government and business leaders had visited Pittsburgh a month earlier, he explained to Burns, they had done nothing but sing the praises of Pittsburgh’s educational system.

“We’re so sick of hearing about Pittsburgh’s schools,” he said, referring to himself and other members of Seattle’s school board. “It’s like all people in Seattle can say is: ‘Why can’t you be like Pittsburgh, why can’t you be like Pittsburgh?’ ”

Such envy over Pittsburgh’s public schools is not uncommon. At a time when the nation’s urban school districts seem almost universally trapped in a quagmire of substandard test scores, high dropout rates, racial strife and failed reforms, the school system in this western Pennsylvania city is making a name for itself as a school district that works.

Much as the city itself has dramatically rebounded from a collapse in the steel industry that had spread deep economic misery here, so the school district has triumphed over a host of obstacles that have stymied other systems.

Innovative educational approaches--backed by political and business leaders and cooperation between administrators and teachers--have formed the basis of Pittsburgh’s school renaissance.

Among the city’s most notable efforts:

--A districtwide monitoring program that keeps close tabs on student performance in basic skills and helps teachers develop strategies to keep achievement levels up.

--A highly regarded system of magnet schools that cater to a wide variety of specialized interests and needs as a way of promoting integration and keeping youngsters from defecting to private, parochial or suburban schools.

--A trend-setting system of in-house teacher training centers that allows classroom instructors to take time off and go back to school themselves to hone their professional skills.

--A “partnership” program between the school board and the teachers’ union that encourages shared decision-making in academic matters through so-called instructional cabinets at each school composed of the principal and top-flight teachers.

--A collaborative, community-wide project that seeks to retain in school a growing population of “at-risk” students--youngsters who are most in danger of dropping out because of such factors as poverty, family breakdown, drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment and homelessness.

--A “pro-schools” corporate community has pumped millions of dollars into educational programs and sponsors an independent agency known as the Allegheny Conference Education Fund, which operates a wide variety of activities benefiting students, teachers and administrators.

Many of these innovations, in one form or another, have been part of education in America for some time. But, elsewhere, urban school districts typically have tried out only one or two of them, and often with disappointing results.

Pittsburgh, along with Dade County, Fla., is one of the few districts that have embraced a wide range of these vanguard educational approaches and organized them in a cohesive mix. Dade County, which includes the city of Miami, has been widely recognized in educational circles for its achievements for several years. But only relatively recently have such tributes come to Pittsburgh.

“Many districts are putting a project in place here and a project there without much focus systemwide,” said Robert A. Hochstein, assistant to the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. “But, in Pittsburgh, it’s all there”--and, he added, apparently working well.

For Pittsburghers, the proof of how well it all works is in the statistics they are fond of citing:

--In the first five years of the district’s rebuilding efforts, the proportion of elementary students scoring at or above national norms in reading soared to 71% from 52%. Since then, the overall gains have been far more gradual but still trending upward each year.

--Pittsburgh’s dropout rate is down to 27% from a high of 35% in 1979 and well below the national average of nearly 50% for urban school districts.

--More than 3,500 students have reentered Pittsburgh’s public schools over the last seven years, reversing a long-time flow of students to private and suburban schools.

--The racial makeup of the school district--about half black and half white--has remained virtually unchanged since the adoption of a school desegregation plan 10 years ago. Such long-term racial balance is rare among school districts that have undergone desegregation.

“I think Pittsburgh has shown the way, been out front and (is) one of the leaders” in public school reform, said Boston Teachers Union President Edward Doherty after he and four other Boston school and government officials visited here not long ago seeking ways to help improve their city’s troubled schools.

The chief architect of Pittsburgh’s educational rebuilding efforts is school Supt. Richard C. Wallace Jr., who arrived in 1980 to a city embroiled in a bitter dispute over school desegregation.

Wallace quickly surveyed students, parents, teachers, administrators and the community at large to gauge views on what the district’s educational priorities should be. Not surprisingly, he says, they placed student achievement at the top of the list--his own personal choice as well.

“Probably the most important thing that . . . survey did was to bring together a board that had been badly divided” by the furor over desegregation, Wallace said. “They all agreed on the priorities that we had to work on; they gave me six months to develop the plans in response to those priorities, and that has basically driven the district since then.”

One of the most original and widely regarded moves was the creation of a district-operated training center for high school teachers in 1983.

The facility, the first of its kind in the nation, involved the transformation of a local high school with its entire student body into an instructional laboratory.

The old faculty was replaced by a staff of resident experts who not only supervised and evaluated the visiting teachers but who also taught the regular classes for students.

So popular did the teacher training program become that, four years after it was initiated, it was expanded to include tuition-paying teachers from many of the surrounding suburban districts.

The program was established at Schenley High, a nearly all-black, inner-city school with a reputation as one of the worst in town.

Today, largely because of the impact of the training center and the magnet programs, Schenley has become one of the most talked-about turnaround stories locally in terms of racial integration and academic achievement.

Its student body is now about 60% black and 40% white, and it regularly ranks in the top half of the city’s 11 high schools on standardized tests in reading and language skills.

Since Schenley’s opening, all of the district’s 986 high school teachers have gone through the program, and similar centers have been established at two other schools for the 1,074 elementary and 720 middle school teachers.

The magnet school program also played a big role in helping the school district achieve its integration goals and in drawing students back to the public schools.

Before a lottery system was put into effect to determine who gets the highly coveted spots if applicants exceed openings, parents would line up outside the magnet schools and wait all night, often in bitter cold, to get the first crack at signing up their children.

Underlying much of the success is the unusually good relations the school system has with the teachers’ union, the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers. The union last went on strike in 1975.

“We’re tough, as anyone will tell you, but we don’t block reform,” said Albert Fondy, the union president.

Not all is rosy in the district, to be sure. Many black parents and community leaders cite as examples the lingering racism in the schools, the relatively low proportion of minority teachers and the still disturbingly wide gap between black and white students in overall achievement levels.

“The school system is going to have to address these problems,” said Tamanika Howze, the mother of three teen-age high school students. “Black students are very frustrated. They don’t see themselves as being respected in the school system.”

One major step the district has taken in that direction is the creation of a pilot project in multicultural education.

Called the Multiracial, Multiethnic and Multicultural Program, or 3M for short, it involves an entire middle school on Pittsburgh’s south side, which enrolls about 650 youngsters, almost evenly divided between blacks and whites, in the sixth through eighth grades.

When the new curriculum is fully implemented, it will incorporate instructional methods ranging from cooperative lesson assignments to an emphasis on oral reporting and examination.

These measures reflect the latest theories on how to stimulate urban black youngsters, who appear to respond better to communal tasks and to a more informal classroom atmosphere stressing verbal skills than to individual written assignments.

Many other school districts might find duplicating Pittsburgh’s successes difficult.

The teacher training centers, for example, have cost more than $10 million so far. Pittsburgh’s school teachers earn an average salary of $44,000 a year--about 50% higher than the national average.

Corporations and foundations have been generous to the schools, contributing more than $25 million to programs in recent years.

The nine-member school board has the authority to raise school taxes on its own without submitting proposed levies to voters or a local or state governing body.

“I can’t tell you how important it is to have the autonomy to tax,” said Burns, the board president. “Some school districts couldn’t build a new gym if the old one was falling down around them.”

Wallace, the school superintendent, said that he was able to turn Pittsburgh’s schools around more quickly because of the money and the caliber of people he has dealt with here.

“But I could have done it anywhere--even in New York,” he added.

Times education writer Jean Merl in Los Angeles contributed to this story.