Children in the Streets : TALES OUT OF SCHOOL: Joseph Fernandez’s Crusade to Rescue American Education, By Joseph Fernandez (Little, Brown: $24.95; 269 pp.)

Since 1983, when the National Commission on Excellence in Education declared our nation “at risk” because of the deficiencies in its public schools, writers high in the ivory tower have issued a deluge of studies and reports about ideal educational curricula. A decade of these books has done little to keep drugs, crime and other social problems from sweeping through our schools, though, and so Americans have come to look upon new ones with something less than breathless anticipation.

Even those tired of pie-in-the-sky theorizing, however, will find a home in “Tales Out of School,” an impressive new book by Joseph Fernandez, the chancellor of the New York City school system. Not another set of theories or policy recommendations destined to be filed away in school-board offices, this is a book about what is happening to our children today, told with a frankness and conviction that suggests answers to education’s most pressing questions. Can we save public schools? The answer is an unequivocal yes. Should we save public schools? Without a doubt, we must. Will it be easy? Absolutely not.

Fernandez doesn’t skirt our more dire social problems, because he has experienced many of them firsthand. “I know about dropouts,” he writes. “I was one. I know about gangs. I was in a few. I still have the scars. I know about the folly of drugs. I used them.”

As a Puerto Rican growing up in New York City, Fernandez found school almost totally irrelevant. He didn’t struggle to achieve athletically or academically because neither, he believed, would help him “survive among the fittest.” At one typical point in his description of life at his inner-city high school, for instance, he describes his reaction after seeing a gang shaking kids down for money in the hallways: “When they hit on one of my buddies, I rounded up some guys and confronted the ones who did it, and we took their money. And it went back and forth.”

For a time, using drugs by the New Jersey ferry docks and swimming in the Hudson River became favorite alternatives to attending classes. Fortunately, Fernandez also spent time at the Manhattanville Neighborhood Center, where he met a counselor who discovered his superior aptitude for math. That ability--along with his realization that he was “just another smart guy from the neighborhood making all the dumb turns”--led him to a job as a radio technician in the Air Force, an experience which allowed him to attend college under the GI Bill of Rights.

While it was college that led Fernandez into teaching, the Air Force seems to have given him the iron discipline that helped him succeed as a principal in the Dade County (greater Miami) public schools. After being promoted to superintendent of the district, Fernandez would visit schools unannounced, setting high standards all were expected to follow.

Fernandez, however, also had a rebellious streak. His program of “satellite schooling”--locating schools at workplaces so parents can spend time with their children--was a success largely because it brazenly ignored official procedure. When the district’s construction agencies estimated that it would cost up to $500,000 to move a school onto one workplace site, for instance, Fernandez brought in a private contractor who managed to do the job for $60,000.

Fernandez also won recognition in Miami for his pioneering work in school-based management, which empowered teachers and won concessions from their union and overturned conventional rules of district administration. Pat Tornillo, president of the Dade Teachers Union, became his greatest ally. “(Pat) wanted what we wanted,” says Fernandez, “professionalization for Dade’s teachers.”

Office infighting and politics with school board members is a real--however distasteful--part of the job for a school superintendent. Fernandez survived these trials well in Miami, but less so in New York. The New York City school board that had lured him away from Dade County in 1989 now has been completely overturned and the new board voted last Wednesday not to renew his contract. He remains chancellor until June. Especially troubling to the new board had been Fernandez’s decision to distribute condoms in high schools, his proposal to include tolerance of gay and lesbian lifstyles in the school curriculum, and his candid criticisms of board members in this book. Fernandez, however, seems to have known that the decision was in the cards. “The truth is,” he writes here, “that in a job like this you reach a point where it’s time to move on anyway.”

Fernandez recognizes that even the best school management is no magic bullet. Schools won’t become relevant to inner-city kids until they have enough money to hire first-rate teachers and buy current textbooks. In many districts nationwide, for instance, students still read history textbooks that depict the civil-rights struggle of the 1960s as a current event.

Fernandez’s discussion of other social problems--from crack babies and low teacher morale to run-down school facilities and institutionalized racism against minority students--is uniformly frank. It is never dispiriting because Fernandez seems to have workable solutions to even the most seemingly intractable problems. (They include improved bilingual education, a training academy for new principals, schools open all day and into the night to accommodate students who must work to supplement their family’s income, and intimate relationships between schools and their communities.)

Now that Joe Fernandez has given us workable solutions, we need to develop the political will to put them into effect. There’s no question that it’s going to cost a lot of money, but look at where we are spending that money now. We spent $45 billion in the Persian Gulf; the entire budget for schools in the state of California is about $20 billion a year. We spend nearly $30,000 a year to incarcerate someone, but only $4,000 a year to educate that same person. It is time, as Joseph Fernandez says often in these pages, to start investing in our future.