SCHOOLS IN CRISIS : THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE : THE POINT MAN FOR THE EDUCATION PRESIDENT IS SMOOTHLY SELLING THE REVOLUTIONARY IDEA OF FIXING SCHOOLS WITHOUT JUST THROWING MONEY AT THEM

The kids at Brookside School in Newark, Del., weren’t sure what to expect when they heard that their tidy brick elementary was in for a visit from the U.S. secretary of education. One 7-year-old asked why a secretary needed to come 95 miles from Washington when Brookside already had Mrs. Belcher answering the phone in the office.

But any uneasiness the children may have felt seemed to melt away when Lamar Alexander, his wife, Honey, and an eager, beaming man who they later learned was their governor, Michael N. Castle, strode through the school’s front door. Secretary Alexander turned out to be a comfortable figure in a blue suit, scuffed black wingtip shoes and wind-whipped brown hair. When he spoke, it was slowly, patiently, authoritatively. “This is my natural habitat,” he said, stretching out his arms to teachers and students.

In a corner of one classroom, Alexander came across a group of children who were kneading a mound of soil to learn about the lives of earthworms. He wedged himself into a tiny chair at their table. Chalk dust soon spotted his lap, his trouser legs, the fat end of his tie and the flaps of his suit coat, but the secretary was unruffled.

Alexander took it in good humor, too, when, at a school assembly, the children suggested some educational reforms that didn’t exactly jibe with his own. “We want to eat lunch whenever we want,” was one of the suggestions presented to Alexander in a loose-leaf binder. “We want to make our school better by doing no homework,” wrote another pupil. And when Gov. Castle gushed that Brookside’s visitor was the most important educator in American schools, Alexander demurred. “No, your teachers and parents , and you, are the most important people in the school,” he told the children in measured tones. The man knew how to charm, all right. As Alexander’s group moved between classrooms, a teacher trilled, “You’ll be in the White House some day!”

Still, when the secretary’s party piled back into a black Lincoln and rumbled up Delaware 2 toward Wilmington, it seemed to some that he had left behind more warm feelings than hard answers. The group of teachers who met with Alexander were told he had no time to field their questions about the Administration’s plans. “We got cut off,” said one. So some teachers remain undecided about the big plans of Alexander and his boss, the man who wants to be called “the education president.” The Brookside teachers were not the first ones frustrated by Alexander’s smooth avoidance. Says Jonathan Kozol, author of “Savage Inequalities: Children in American Schools” and a former Boston teacher: “Trying to have a dialogue with him is maddening. He evades tough questions.”

IN THE YEAR SINCE PRESIDENT BUSH NOMINATED HIM, FORmer Tennessee Gov. Alexander has embarked on a cordial crusade to charm America into educational reform. On the battleground of school restructuring, where so many leaders have risen only to fall, Alexander has declared that he would rather persuade than denounce, co-opt than confront. But as at Brookside School, there is also the risk that amid the feel-good oom-pah of his brass band, the point will be lost: His audience may remember his unspoken PR message but not any discussion of the three Rs.

Alexander has built his America 2000 program strategy around a few core ideas: standards, the notion that all students should be expected to master certain material; testing, the idea that performance should be compared state to state and student to student; accountability, the idea that there should be rewards for good performance and penalties for poor work for teachers and administrators, and choice, the principle that families should be able to use tax funds to send their children to any school, including private ones. In the mellifluous accents of east Tennessee, in syntax as flawless as his President’s is fractured, Alexander has asked all involved in education to come along. And he has promised them that the churning locomotive of reform--his favorite image--will chug forward without them if they don’t. “We haven’t been radical enough in responding to the problem,” he says.

Alexander, 51, is the nation’s fifth education secretary, and his appointment last March was arguably the most warmly received. He had the credentials: An assistant in the Nixon White House and aide to former Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. (R-Tenn.), Alexander tied his fortunes to school reform as two-term Tennessee governor from 1979 to 1987. In that position, he increased the education budget, instituted controversial merit pay for teachers and led the reform charge among the nation’s governors. From 1988 to early 1991, he fleshed out his educational resume as president of the University of Tennessee.

A politician of surpassing polish, Alexander could hardly have chosen a better moment to enter the national scene. His predecessor, Lauro F. Cavazos, amiable but ineffective, was forced from office. Cavazos’ predecessor was the fiery William J. Bennett, who won wide attention but alienated many with his scalding attacks on the educational Establishment, which he once called “the blob.”

The time was right, too, because of signs that a despairing public was receptive to national leadership on what has for so long been a local issue. In one recent poll, more than one in three Americans said the educational system needed radical reform. Another poll showed that 89% of Americans said they considered education the top national priority--more important, even, than a strong military or thriving economy.

Greeting an interviewer in his office, Alexander takes a seat in one of several Tennessee rocking chairs. Framed letters from admiring schoolchildren hang on the walls. At a certain point in the conversation, he slides to the edge of his chair with an expression of rapt earnestness. Some people who have dealt with him say the effect is less than spontaneous. Some describe Alexander with terms such as “calculated” and “elusive.” “He’s smooth as silk--maybe too smooth,” says Michael Usdan, president of the Institute for Educational Leadership, an education-reform group in Washington, who in many ways is an admirer. Says predecessor Bennett: “He’s sort of a kinder, gentler version of me.”

Alexander acknowledges that he tries to avoid confrontation. “I could have provoked a fight easily, because these are difficult changes for people in the system,” he says about his plan. “But we thought we could get more change by creating a framework . . . a general direction that would produce anxiety--but not so much anxiety that nobody would do anything.”

The interview takes place at the end of a hectic day, and Alexander is clearly fatigued. He ruffles the hairs on the back of his head with his fingertips. Some tufts stand on end. Only once do his eyes light up--when he is told of a White House aide who contends that Alexander gets more “face time” with the President than any other Cabinet secretary.

Already, Alexander’s efforts have bathed him and his President in favorable publicity, helping thrust education to the top of the national agenda--and, not incidentally, enabling Bush to claim a popular domestic cause he so badly needs in the 1992 campaign. “We’ve already stirred up a lot of dust,” Alexander says. “I sense enough rumbling out there that after all the discussion of the 1980s, I think we’re going to come fairly quickly to a breakthrough.”

Even many figures in the education Establishment acknowledge that because of his style, credentials and timing, Alexander may have the best chance of anyone in years to catalyze real change. “This could be a watershed,” says Usdan. But it’s a delicate balancing act: If Alexander seems too revolutionary, he will be stalemated by political foes and unbending bureaucracies. If he is too gentle, his campaign will devolve into a hollow pep rally.

When he isn’t calling it a locomotive or a revolution, Alexander describes his crusade as a long-running, grass-roots effort that won’t have a quick payoff. Indeed, even now, there is no make-or-break test of the viability of the Administration’s program on the horizon. But the obvious shortcomings of American education remain painfully apparent, so before too long Alexander will need to show tangible successes: development of new “break-the-mold” schools that are to be developed by consortiums of experts with private seed money, for example, or advancement in the tricky effort to develop an accepted national testing system or successful adoption in some areas of the voucher system, or choice.

Without those, it will be hard to claim achievement of the real goal--improvement in what happens to children in the classroom. Without visible progress, the Administration may cede the initiative to the opposition: the 2.3-million-member teachers’ unions and their allies in Congress, who have a decidedly different agenda. They are openly hostile to giving public money to private schools to increase parents’ enrollment choices. They would like to sharply increase the $32-billion federal education budget, to funnel more U.S. aid to school districts and put greater emphasis on disadvantaged students and big-city school districts that face the most intractable problems.

ALEXANDER SEES A COUNTRY WHERE REAL, FEDERAL PER CAPITA education spending has increased by one-third since 1980, but performance has improved only slightly--not nearly enough to keep up with the United States’ international competitors.

In Alexander’s view, the first obstacle to reform is the view of so many Americans that their own schools are fine, though the system desperately needs change. “The first and foremost problem is, people say, ‘The nation’s at risk, and I’m OK,’ ” he says. He mentions it only obliquely, but underlying his plan is his idea that American education’s grade-inflated system needs an old-fashioned castor-oil antidote: more rewards for good performance and penalties for bad. This idea appears in the Administration’s plans to set standards for knowledge in geography, history, English, math and science and to create a so-called American Achievement Test, which would rate kids’ knowledge in tests that will enable parents to make school-by-school, student-by-student comparisons. How soon these yardsticks will be available is unclear. The Administration is pushing at least to have state-by-state comparisons for fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders in the five core subjects by 1994.

“Alexander says we should give national exams so parents can compare how well the schools are doing,” Kozol says. “But he is not willing to give equal funding, so the children in Mississippi will get an education worth $3,000, and the kids in the rich suburbs of New York will get an education worth $25,000. He refuses to give them equal resources, but he imposes equal standards.”

The Administration plan’s most controversial element, the school-choice principle, is also intended to be a potent incentive to conservatives, educational reformers and a few black activists who contend that by enabling any child to go to any school, government can channel more money to good schools and less to bad. Many educators contend that such plans violate the constitutional principle of separation of church and state and would leave public schools as underfunded warehouses for poor children.

Alexander argues that, far from hurting disadvantaged children, choice would give them the options that are already exercised by more prosperous Americans when they choose a neighborhood to live in. “We don’t want to live with a national policy that in effect says everybody has a choice of schools except poor people, which is the choice of policies we have today.”

Alexander wants a choice system in which state and local governments would provide tuition for elementary and secondary students in much the way the federal government now provides grants and scholarships to colleges, irrespective of any religious affiliation. As advocates envision it, private--including parochial--schools would be eligible, so long as they met certain federal standards in such areas as non-discrimination. Public-school systems would continue to exist but would probably be smaller.

Alexander predicts that choice will soon be so widely accepted that it will become a “non-issue.” Four or five years ago, he says, some people advocated enrollment choice among public schools--usually within a school district, although Minnesota allows public-school choice throughout the state. Some educators thought it was “the worst thing in the world,” Alexander says. “Now they’re all for it, in just four years. They’ll be all for the rest of it before long.”

This year, about half a dozen states considered legislation to adopt some form of choice. Some have adopted public-school choice, with Milwaukee coming closest to public-or-private choice.

Still, Alexander doesn’t whet his ax on the education Establishment, as Bennett did. While he says some educators have stood in the way of change, he acknowledges merit in the teachers’ complaints that so many of education’s troubles derive from outside the school--in troubled families, poverty and the overwhelming needs of the nation’s immigrants.

Last of the pillars of Alexander’s campaign is the creation of “New American Schools” in each of the nation’s 535 congressional districts. The effort is directed by a business-run, nonprofit corporation, which next spring is expected to start signing contracts with school “design teams” of universities, education reformers, think-tanks, private companies and others. Alexander--perhaps trying to offer critics a smaller target--won’t speculate on what specific changes these schools will make. But he points out features of today’s schools that may soon be considered archaic: Children are sent home around 3 p.m., though their parents often work and aren’t there to receive them; most schools close in the summer, though the vacation hasn’t been needed since most youngsters and teachers worked on farms, and today’s schools incorporate few of the technological advances of the past decades.

“We’re trying to start over,” Alexander says. “Instead of trying to invent a better pony express, we’re trying to imagine the telegraph.”

LAMAR ALEXANDER RAN HIS FIRST CAMPAIGN FOR TENNESSEE GOVernor in 1974, flying between the ladies clubs’ bean suppers wearing a blue suit, brown oxfords and the dignity expected of young Republican office-seekers. He got a shellacking at the polls.

Four years later, evidently better briefed from the shirt-sleeve-candidates’ playbook, Alexander started his campaign with a trip to an Army surplus store. He bought a pile of red-and-black-checked flannel shirts and set out on a freezing January day for a campaign walk across the 1,022 miles of Tennessee. With him for part of the journey was a washboard band on a flatbed truck, whom he accompanied at intervals on trombone and piano. He shook a thousand hands a day, got lots of flattering press and won. It’s a lesson he’s never forgotten.

Alexander grew up in the southeast Tennessee town of Maryville, pop. 17,480, son of a strong-willed mother, Florence, who ran a nursery school in her garage, and a gentle father, Andrew, a sometime-schoolteacher and school board member. The town, whose name is locally pronounced MARE-vul, is in the heartland of the Republican border-state South, where racial relations have generally been harmonious. Even now some old men refer to flatland Democrats as “rebels.”

Alexander started playing piano when he was 4, won a college scholarship (which he didn’t use) and today still limbers his fingers on Czerny exercises and jazz. He has written four books, including “Six Months Off,” a well-received account of the time he took his wife and children to Australia to get reacquainted after the distractions of the governorship. Another book, “Steps Along the Way,” is a chatty “scrapbook” of his days as governor. In it, he recalls how he met his wife, then Honey Buhler, at a softball game in Washington, when she was an aide to former Texas Sen. John Tower, and he worked for Sen. Baker. Her bright red shorts, he said, caught his attention: “After seeing Honey for the first time, I began playing softball the way a peacock struts through the barnyard.”

But in spite of his folksy, hard-working image, Alexander is no regular Joe. “He dismisses money in his urbane, amiable manner as something of only marginal significance,” Kozol says, “while he sends his own kids to the most expensive schools in Washington.” Alexander’s son Will and daughter Katherine attend the elite private Georgetown Day School (his other two children are in college). Says Alexander: “I have never tried to make a political point with my children.” Of course, the Alexanders’ choice is consistent with his position that it is un-American to tell parents where to send their children to be educated.

Associates say Alexander is so focused on his main goals that he can let other matters slip. As governor, he sometimes showed up at the office wearing different colored socks. But sometimes his single-mindedness meant that minor day-to-day business slipped. Says former Chief of Staff Tom Ingram: “If he has a weakness, it’s that other matters can go unattended.”

Alexander’s geniality doesn’t mean he always ducks a fight. Tennessee teachers are still bitter over his successful battle to institute merit pay--a program, teachers claim, that requires them to spend hours filling out forms and meeting complex criteria, all for a maximum $3,000 annual bonus. Tennessee Education Assn. officials still describe Alexander as a self-promoter who can be harsh. “He’s non-confrontational only until you cross him,” says Cavit Cheshier, executive secretary of the Tennessee Education Assn.

IN HIS NEW JOB, HOWEVer, Alexander has often played the role of conciliator, and in his many public appearances he masks the sharp edges of his agenda, such as choice. He spends much of his time hopping between cities, attending community consciousness-raising sessions, persuading states and localities to adopt their own versions of his America 2000 plan. So far, 30 states, including California, have embraced America 2000 with their own plans just as Delaware did on the day of Alexander’s Brookside School visit. Although Alexander insists that his views on choice “are more radical than anybody’s,” the incendiary issue is rarely mentioned in these outings.

To date, Alexander’s handling of teachers and Congress--the two principal obstacles to his program--has been skillful. He has asked for their help and counsel, worked around them when he could and made them reluctant to be perceived as obstacles in the path of his crusade. Some members of the American Federation of Teachers booed Alexander when he appeared at their July convention, and President Albert Shanker has declared that if the Administration wants a fight over choice, “they’ve got it.” But Bella Rosenberg, another AFT official, says Alexander “is someone you can work with.”

Congress has yet to act on the Bush proposals introduced last April, and many Democratic members have complained about how little Bush’s plan offers in new spending for the disadvantaged. “It abandons the most central mission of the federal government in education,” says Rep. Major R. Owens (D-N.Y.), who heads a House subcommittee on education. Yet Owens--like Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee--praises Alexander’s attitude and credentials. “He’s a very effective, dedicated, likable guy,” Owens says.

Alexander’s effort also has been a hit with senior White House officials and the President, whose name Alexander invokes at nearly every public appearance. Bush allowed Alexander to formulate his own educational program, so long as it included the one item the White House insisted on--choice, says Ingram, who helped Alexander in the transition program last spring.

Alexander’s strategy of gentle revolution has been evident in his choice and handling of his top aides. As assistant secretary for research he named Diane Ravitch, a brilliant and sometimes abrasive education historian from Columbia University. Ravitch has fought for higher academic standards and argued that education has sometimes gone too far in trying to accommodate the interests of minorities in cultural pluralism. As his top deputy and operations chief, Alexander picked former Xerox Chairman David T. Kearns, who has urged that schools instill moral and religious values and operate more like businesses. The intellectual father of Alexander’s program was informal adviser Chester E. (Checker) Finn Jr., a Vanderbilt University professor and reform-group chief who has been called “Rasputin” for his confrontational style while a Bennett aide.

But while Alexander has provocative thinkers on his team, so far he has insisted that they mind their manners. “I’ve had to keep my mouth shut,” Ravitch joked in a meeting earlier this year.

Meanwhile, as he has in previous jobs, Alexander has reserved for himself the lead role in burnishing the image of his 4,800-employee department. In this area, no detail is too small and public relations is paramount: Alexander personally came up with the America 2000 name and chose the logo for the effort from a selection offered by a New York ad agency. But the secretary has not been completely successful in handling public relations problems engendered by the personal business deals that have made him a wealthy man since he entered public life. A series of transactions, including several with influential friends, increased his net worth from $150,000 in 1978 to between $1.5 million and $3 million today. In a 1987 deal, Alexander bought a one-third interest in an east Tennessee mountain inn from a businessman who is a longtime friend. Before he became University of Tennessee president in January, 1988, Alexander transferred the holding to his wife. During his tenure, the university spent $64,626 at 16 functions at the inn, including meals at which Alexander himself was present.

Alexander said he transferred his ownership on the advice of the state attorney general and the university’s general counsel. In any case, he has argued, the inn was a money-loser, so the family was not enriched by the spending. Still, when the incident came up again last August during an investigation of possible conflicts of interest by university officials, the Knoxville News-Sentinel carried a commentary: “In a conflict- of-interest stink test, Alexander should have reached for his nose immediately. . . .”

But the hint of impropriety may be only the precursor of bigger problems. Many predict Alexander’s life will inevitably be more contentious in the future than it has been in his first half-year. If he is dedicated to change, “sooner or later, he’s going to have to adjust his style,” predicts Bennett. “He wants the train rolling--but he’s going to find there are people out there who want to blow up the tracks. Sooner or later, he’s going to have to start trading punches.”