TO HIS STUDENTS, Michael A. Johnson is a little like one of those slightly overbearing parents -- the kind who is always packing off his kids to private schools and tutors or Stanley Kaplan courses to make sure that they get into an Ivy League college. The principal and founder of the Science Skills Center, a three-year-old public high school at the base of the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn, Johnson -- that's Mr. Johnson to you and me -- is physically and spiritually imposing. At 45, he has closely cropped hair, a thin mustache, big round glasses and an irrepressible laugh, and typically greets his students in the hallways with an enveloping bear hug.
Although many of his students come from impoverished neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York and Oceanhill-Brownsville, Johnson has no qualms about pushing them to overachieve. Last spring, for instance, he had his ninth graders take the P.S.A.T.'s -- for fun. The tests, which are normally administered in a student's sophomore or junior year, determine who will win National Merit Scholarships, and Johnson, who is black, wanted his students, many of whom are also black, to have the same sort of extra help and practice that kids from more affluent backgrounds often groan about and take for granted.
''The day we got the scores back,'' he brags, ''the kids were running around saying, 'What did you get? What did you get?' One of them told me: 'I'm upset, Mr. Johnson! I only got 1100!' '' -- out of 1600. ''And I said: 'Give me a break! You got two years to work on that score!' That told me a lot about the school.''
Just what it says, however, is open to interpretation and is part of a far larger debate over ''national standards'' and the very purpose of public education. New York City has been the scene of a burgeoning school-reform movement that represents the biggest expansion of the city's school system in more than half a century: some 60 new public schools have been created in the last few years by various philanthropic and community organizations and the Board of Education.
With its emphasis on standardized tests, the Science Skills Center is an anomaly among these new schools, and Johnson something of pariah within the reform movement. ''A lot of these groups are supporting a single model of school reform,'' says Beth Lief, president and chief executive of New Visions for Public Schools, an organization in Manhattan that works with the private sector and the Board of Education to promote school reform and that has created 22 new schools to date, including Johnson's. She is referring to an approach that focuses on the way students learn, not on what they learn. Most progressive educators regard standardized tests as a backward, even discriminatory tool for assessing performance and push for methods like ''portfolios,'' compilations of students' classwork that are graded individually without reference to national standards or norms.
''A lot of people in the school-reform community aren't really interested in seeing Michael succeed,'' says Eric Nadelstern, a principalin-residence at New Visions last year. ''And he doesn't have a lot of friends in the school system, either. He came from outside the system, and people at the Board of Ed put a lot of stake in working your way up and paying your dues, which he didn't do.'' Frank Volpicella, the Brooklyn high-school representative for the United Federation of Teachers, remarks: ''I'm not a big fan of Mr. Johnson's. I don't think he's going in the right direction.'' Even Nadelstern says, ''I respect what Michael is doing, but I've got a problem calling it school reform.''
J OHNSON'S ACADEMIC PROGRAM IS DRIVEN BY THE NEW YORK STATE Regents exams, a series of achievement tests that students can elect to take to demonstrate mastery in several core academic subjects like English and chemistry. Students who pass eight of the exams receive what's known as a Regents diploma, which is a little like graduating summa cum laude; only some 20 percent of the city's 30,000-plus high-school graduates achieve this distinction each year. While the majority of the city's neighborhood public high schools offer a watered-down curriculum -- basic algebra year after year, for example -- Science Skills requires all of its 650 students to take the kind of advanced-placement classes in history, science and math that one typically finds in the better private schools. In an effort to beef up academic standards, the State Board of Education has announced that passing the Regents will be a requirement for graduates in all schools within two years, but many progressive educators have denounced the move as condemning poor, minority-group children to failure.
The Board of Education grades its own schools mainly by looking at attendance, dropout rates, number of violent incidents and students' scores on minimal-competency exams. To judge by these criteria, Johnson's school can be described as wildly successful. Its attendance rate is 94 percent; no one has dropped out; last year, despite a sudden increase in violent incidents throughout the city's school system, Science Skills did not report a single altercation. And although all of Johnson's students come from the city's open lottery system, all of them, even those designated as special-education students, take his Regents program and are passing, which requires a score of 65 percent. This is in contrast to a school system where half of all entering freshman fail to meet even the minimum requirements to graduate in four years. Even Johnson's critics concede that he has created a rigorous academic climate at the school.
Parents are evidently pleased: the Science Skills Center has received three times as many applications as any other New Visions school. If this isn't school reform, what is? ''To my mind,'' insists Nadelstern, ''school reform involves rethinking what students learn and how they should learn it, not just pressing kids to pass exams.''
Such fundamental disagreement over the very purpose of school reform goes to the heart of what Lisa Delpit, a black educator and author, describes as a growing rift between black and white progressive educators. Delpit, who won a MacArthur ''genius'' grant in 1990, is the Deborah Tannen of school reform, explaining to many white educators why ''you just don't understand.'' In ''Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom,'' published last year, Delpit argues that many of the most cherished tenets of school reform of the last 20 years -- that the open classroom is ''the most 'humanizing' of learning environments,'' that children should be ''in control of their own learning,'' tha
