When Michael A. Johnson first visited Intermediate School 192 in southeastern Queens last month, he found students capering down hallways and shouting out of windows during class.
Every day, more than 100 students were late, and 15 to 17 teachers were absent. The fluorescent lights were dim. The computers were not connected to high-speed wiring.
Two weeks later, Mr. Johnson strode through the door again, wire-rim glasses flashing. An anxious deputy flitted out of the shadows with the good news: ''Mr. Johnson, 38 students late this morning.''
''How many teachers absent?'' Mr. Johnson asked. ''Two,'' came the reply.
A no-nonsense engineer turned principal, Mr. Johnson is now the acting superintendent of District 29 -- one of the first appointments made by the interim chancellor, Harold O. Levy -- and his job is to take one of the city's most middle-class black school districts and turn it around. The schools in District 29 perform near the citywide average on standardized tests. But considering its affluence -- it covers well-groomed neighborhoods of single-family homes like Rosedale and Laurelton -- it should be doing much better, Mr. Johnson said.
What is worse, he said, the longer students stay in the district's schools, the more their performance deteriorates.
A lot is riding on whether Mr. Johnson succeeds. If he improves the district, he could demonstrate that a single strong leader working with traditional methods of instruction can have an impact in neighborhoods bogged down in mediocrity. If he fails, he could add to the disillusionment over the promise of public education.
In District 29's case, mediocre scores have also put the district on the front lines of the war over school vouchers. It is the former Congressional district of the Rev. Floyd Flake, pastor of Allen A.M.E. Church, and Mr. Flake has used the district as ammunition in his campaign for vouchers.
In 1993, Mr. Johnson founded the Science Skills Center, a high school at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn. As principal, he offended his fellow school reformers by demanding that his black and Hispanic students, many from poor families, take the SAT's and Regents tests that are more commonly expected of upper-middle class children bound for college.
His students did well: 86 percent of his 11th graders passed the English Regents examination in 1998, compared with 40 percent of those in schools with similar economic and racial demographics.
''I came from a school that was just about all black and it was a high-achieving school,'' Mr. Johnson said. ''There is a culture to good-schoolness. You can assert that in any setting, albeit superficially at first. But it will take root.''
Mr. Levy knew of the Skills Center by reputation, and recognized a kindred spirit in Mr. Johnson, right down to his swashbuckling manner and a shared penchant for pinstripe suits and crisply starched shirts.
Mr. Levy appointed Mr. Johnson on Feb. 11, after suspending the elected school board because it could not agree on a permanent superintendent. Leroy Comrie Jr., the president of the board, said he believed the board had been suspended because it had opposed plans to build a junior high school on the site of Creedmore Psychiatric Center.
About 2 percent of the district's 27,000 students are white, 75 percent are black, 12 percent are Hispanic and 11 percent are Asian. Only 32 percent of the district's eighth graders passed the state's English test, compared with 36 percent for the city, and just 14 percent passed the math test, compared with 23 percent for the city.
Mr. Johnson says he is determined to avoid district politics and to focus on education. Two weeks ago, he took a reporter on a tour of three schools, to demonstrate his approach.
At I.S. 192, he told how he had taken walkie-talkies away from the assistant principals, who had been, he said with disgust, behaving more like police officers than educators. He brought in about 25 teacher trainers and administrators to supervise the staff. As he peeked into classrooms the other day, many of the regular teachers were sitting in the back of the room, while Mr. Johnson's staff modeled lessons for them.
At the next school Mr. Johnson visited, P.S. 131, one of the district's best, he asked the principal, Walter J. O'Brien, what he needed. Mr. O'Brien did not hesitate. Many of his immigrant students, he said, are bright enough to test out of English language classes very quickly, then ''get clobbered'' on the state's standardized tests. Mr. O'Brien asked for a summer-school program to perfect their English. Mr. Johnson was thrilled. ''I can almost guarantee you'll get it,'' he said.
But at the next school, P.S. 36, Mr. Johnson was once again shaking his head in dismay. Through the door of one classroom, a teacher could be heard yelling ''Zip it! Zip it!'' to the children. Another teacher had locked the classroom door. In another classroom, the children were working in near darkness. The teacher said they had just returned from lunch and she had forgotten to turn on the lights.
The principal introduced the woman who heads the school's leadership team. ''What are you working on now?'' Mr. Johnson asked politely. The woman could not remember.
Mr. Johnson asked the principal, Cynthia M. Hunter, what she needed. She said she needed another paraprofessional to walk children to the bathroom. ''How about academics?'' Mr. Johnson prodded. The principal said 300 of the school's 523 students had received letters warning that they were at risk of being assigned to summer school. She expected 150 of them to have to go.
Mr. Johnson suggested that she send all 300 nonetheless. ''I would have 150 in a program to meet the standards, and 150 in a program to push them above,'' he said.
The principal said she liked the idea, but would not be in a position to carry it out. She had ''opted out'' of summer school, she said, under a provision of her union contract. ''Who will be taking over your school?'' Mr. Johnson asked. ''I don't know,'' the principal replied.
