There's a story they tell about Joe Fern-andez in Miami. After he became superintendent of the Dade County schools in 1987, he made a surprise visit to a school in a poor neighbourhood. Trash filled the schoolyard, and broken windows were everywhere. Inside, the stench of dirty toilets radiated through the school.

Fernandez pushed open the principal's door to find him watching a soap opera. 'Pack up and get out of here!' Fernandez barked.

That was Friday. By Saturday afternoon workmen were fixing windows, mowing grass and painting halls. And by Tuesday there was a new principal.

The words many friends use to describe Joe Fernandez are the same: 'tough', 'street-smart', 'charismatic'. He is a man who gets things done.

Last January, Fernandez took charge of the biggest and perhaps most troubled school system in the nation. He became New York City's Chancellor of Public Schools.

'Get ready!' Fernandez announced his first week. He planned to make changes that would 'turn the system on its head'. Joe Fernandez, a high-school dropout and one-time gang member who left the slums of New York 37 years ago, had finally come home.

Once, New York's public schools were regarded as the best in the nation. They have produced 25 Nobel Prize-winners and countless high achievers. But now basic education has sunk so low that the New York Telephone Company recently had to test 57,000 people to find just 2100 who were qualified to become operators and repair technicians.

'We're failing to prepare kids,' Fernandez says. 'We need more than a Band-Aid approach. It may mean five-year high schools or 11-month school years or Saturday school. Five years from now, I want New York's school system to be one of the best in the U.S.'

Can Fernandez beat the odds against him? The sheer size of the New York system is overwhelming: nearly 1000 schools and 937,000 students, of whom 80 percent are black or Hispanic and one-third live below the poverty line. The system's annual budget of $6.4 billion is more than the gross national product of many countries - yet it has failed to produce results.

Over half the public school students are reading below grade level, in some schools more than 80 percent. At least 30 percent will never graduate. Crime has sky-rocketed. Assaults increased 54 percent last year just in elementary schools.

New York has so much difficulty attracting qualified teachers that nearly 20 percent are temporaries and many have no formal teacher's training. At the same time, licensing has been so lax that a man accused of sexual crimes in New Jersey and convicted of a sexual crime in Connecticut was hired in New York. Soon afterward he was accused of abusing two students in his school.

Meanwhile, more than one-third of the city's 32 community school boards have been investigated for corruption.

Undaunted, Fernandez hit the streets of New York running. His fourth day on the job, he transferred a principal for failing to control disruptive students. Within a few weeks, he had eliminated 14 departments and about 400 jobs at headquarters. In less than two months he had removed two district superintendents and three more principals, in addition to pushing for a stronger role for himself in the selection of superintendents.

Ironically, Joe Fernandez might have been just another sad New York City statistic himself. As a boy he knew poverty, growing up in a Manhattan slum. At 16, he dropped out of school and joined a gang. He still carries a scar on his face that he got in a brawl. Friends overdosed on drugs; others went to jail. One was stabbed to death in a bar.

The Air Force was his escape. In it, he earned a high-school equivalency diploma. In 1956 he married Lily Pons and, after leaving the service, studied mathematics at Columbia University. When a doctor told Fernandez that his sickly son needed a warmer climate, he moved the family south and worked his way through the University of Miami as a postman and a milkman.

He became a high-school teacher in 1963, and chairman of the math department within a year. By 1975, he was a principal. In 1985, the one-time dropout became a doctor of education. He continued to rise until 1987, when he became superintendent of the nation's fourth largest school system.

When Joe Fernandez took over, the Miami schools, like New York City's, were demoralized. In two short years, he removed or transferred 48 principals. He launched Saturday classes. He established dozens of 'magnet schools', specializing in the arts, computers, broadcasting and other professional fields. He set up schools in facilities supplied by an insurance company, a community college and the Miami airport, enabling children to study near their working parents. A system that used to have a hard time finding qualified teachers now has nine applications for every vacancy.

I remembered something that Fernandez once told me: 'We have the potential to lose a whole generation of kids unless we do something quickly.' 'Can you do it?' I asked him.

Smiling, he replied, 'If you reach for the sky and tell kids what you're reaching for, a lot of them will reach along with you.'