By LYNDA RICHARDSON 

Every school day at Louis D. Brandeis High School in Manhattan, Alfred Cruz punches his student identification card into the machine just inside the front entrance. He steps onto a metal scanner and if the red light blinks on, he has to empty his pockets. He shoves his book bag through the X-ray machine, then he raises his arms so a security officer can wave a portable metal detector over his body like a wand.

Alfred says he no longer minds the mechanized routine of going to school, but educators point to the metal detector as a vivid emblem of the failures of the large urban high school. Overcrowded and impersonal, with a threat of violence, schools like Brandeis contribute to a staggering truancy rate, particularly among black and Hispanic boys, academic experts and educators say.

"The sheer size of these schools creates a factory mentality," said Jonathan Kozol, an expert on urban education. "The kids feel dehumanized. The teachers do also. The very impersonality of the situation encourages people to leave. They are not inviting places."

Many educators say the answer is wholesale restructuring of many of the city's worst high schools. In the last decade, a number of smaller high schools have opened, with more than 30 last fall alone, admitting a mix of students from throughout the city. But the opening of these schools has created an unintended side effect: the concentration of the most troubled students in the most troubled high schools, like Brandeis. Students apply to the smaller schools and are admitted selectively. The neighborhood high schools must take the rest.

One-Fourth Missing

Brandeis's grip on many of its 2,500 students is tenuous; more than 650 are absent on a typical school day. Alfred himself, who is repeating 10th grade, was a chronic truant until this spring. It was only when Brandeis put him in a special program that permits him to attend school from 8 to 11:30 A.M., and still receive high school credit, that he began showing up regularly.

He found it easy to disappear -- in body and spirit. "Most of the teachers weren't alive," the 16-year-old said. "They'll teach you something and they expect you to get it and if you don't, they just move on to the next thing. They never gave a chance to the students and I guess they lost me along the way. If they didn't care, why do it?"

A decade has passed since hundreds of millions of dollars in state aid became widely available in New York for counselors, school-based programs, computers to track attendance, social workers, tutoring and hotlines for parents to stem truancy. And Mayor Rudolph W. Guiliani has initiated police sweeps in which hundreds of out-of-school children are detained in seven school collection centers, including one at Brandeis.

But experts say these programs are patches in a fundamentally flawed system that clusters the most troubled students in the most crowded, dangerous schools.

Despite the spending of more than $60 million this year for prevention efforts in the city schools, truancy continues to grow. In New York City high schools, a higher percentage of students were found to be long-term absentees -- showing up for one or fewer days in a month -- in the 1992-1993 academic year than in the previous three years, according to the latest Board of Education statistics. About one of every four students is absent each day at Brandeis, four times the national rate.

'Symptoms of Anonymity'

"Truancy and attendance problems are symptoms of anonymity," said Michelle Fine, a psychology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center who has studied the characteristics of dropouts. "Those same students shift their attendance patterns when they go to the smaller schools."

The four-story Brandeis High School, on West 84th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, is at the bottom of an informal pyramid that has evolved among the 126 high schools throughout the city. It has the lowest reading scores for incoming students of any Manhattan high school. Out of 2,500 students, only about 60 are taking advanced placement courses.

At the top of the pyramid are the four elite high schools -- Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx High School of Science and Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School -- which require strict competitive exams to enter. In the vast middle are the educational options schools, or magnet schools, that select a mix of students, with 75 percent reading at or above grade level. Only a relative handful are at-risk students: poor academic performers with troubled personal lives.

Alfred Cruz did not want to go to Brandeis. He had applied to Chelsea Vocational High School, a smaller magnet school of about 1,000 students in SoHo, but he was placed on a long waiting list and did not enter. He said he was all too familiar with many Brandeis students from his West 106th Street neighborhood, where he walks past drug dealers and dropouts every day.

The Last Option

"Nobody really wants to go to a zoned school," said Alfred, who wants to be a rap musician. "It explains itself. It's like a last option. You want to try for other options. If you don't get accepted anywhere else, you just automatically go there."

When the school year began, Alfred showed up at Brandeis for the first several weeks, then disappeared. He could be found a couple of blocks away in a laundromat playing video games all day.

He was picked up twice in police truancy sweeps and deposited back at Brandeis, but always drifted back to the streets. He said he was bored by his teachers and daydreamed about rap music and girls instead of classwork.

"It's like a 50-50 bargain," he said. "If the teachers are not all there, it's guaranteed that the students aren't going to listen. But if the teachers are alive and want more class participation, then the students will see that this teacher knows what he's talking about."

Alfred has attended class regularly since February, when he was placed in a shortened academic program aimed at keeping children in school. He whisks through five classes by 11:30 A.M. He has a gym teacher who tunes a radio to hip hop music and a physical science teacher who acts more like a coach.

Praise for Coming

On a recent morning, he was one of nine students who straggled into Stephanie Aiges's English class. There are 15 on the register in the class; even so, she lavished praise on the ones who showed up. She hailed the attendance as "excellent" for a bright spring day. Then Ms. Aiges, who is also a licensed psychologist, complimented Alfred's new braided hair-do, cajoled other students into writing in their journals and showered them with praise for coming to class. The truncated academic program was created with the idea that amassing four credits instead of the usual seven toward a diploma is better than none at all.

The reasons given for chronic absenteeism vary widely -- single-parent families and a lack of supervision, difficult home lives, traditional adolescent rebellion and boredom with school. Increasingly, a host of reasons are emerging that were unheard of a generation ago, said Jay Smink, the executive director of the National Dropout Prevention Center, a clearinghouse and research center based at Clemson University in South Carolina.

"One of them is safety," Mr. Smink said. "Kids are afraid to go to school because of school violence and everything related to that issue."

As at many other large neighborhood schools, Brandeis's security force is strong. There are 12 uniformed safety officers, as well as a couple of New York City police officers posted there as part of the Mayor's truancy campaign.

While the school seems orderly and quiet on many school days, a security officer's skull was fractured last November when he was jumped by several students in a riot of overturned chairs and hurled food in the school cafeteria jammed with several hundred students. The security officer had arrested a student the day before and in retaliation, the student's friends pummeled the guard, who was rushed outside by a school aide for his protection, according to teachers and security officers.

Losing the Building

"The school lost the building to the kids," said Andy Welsh, a school neighborhood worker who is part of the guidance support staff and visits students' homes. "It became an extension of the streets."

Brandeis High's attempts to stem truancy have been a hodgepodge, with money from several sources. The major financing has come from the state Attendance Improvement and Dropout Prevention Program, established by the Legislature in 1984. The New York City Board of Education funnels most of the $63 million it receives to just 34 high schools identified as having poor academic performance and low attendance. They are called Project Achieve schools; a common characteristic is metal detectors in the front hallways.

Brandeis is a Project Achieve school and receives between $500,000 and $750,000 a year for guidance counselors, computers to track attendance, hotlines for parents and school-based programs. But school officials acknowledge that many students still slip through the cracks.

"When you have a school with 2,500 students, it's hard to catch every person," said Suzanne Kaszynski, the assistant principal in charge of guidance. "Our hope is that within our school, there are enough systems that will kick in if one doesn't."

But the critics say that the programs, however well-intentioned, are inadequate to deal with the problems that the students bring to school each day.

 Students take academic courses through the year in small divisions called "houses," consisting of 100 to 350 students, as part of the Project Achieve program. The houses, which have their own deans, guidance counselors and grade advisers, are intended to break down the anonymity of a large city school.

Focus Is on Themes

The houses are generally oriented around themes like health careers, teaching and business skills, like the Coop House to which Alfred was assigned last fall. But Alfred said the Coop House did not make him feel any closer to Brandeis. "I was at school for a couple of months before I faded away and cut out."

Some of the 10 houses at Brandeis are ill-defined or viewed as dumping grounds, according to Michael Manley, a physical education teacher who is the school's representative in the United Federation of Teachers. The houses that work most effectively are the smallest ones, including the Academy of Learning and Teaching, which uses experimental instructional techniques, and the Evergreen House, which has a horticulture theme and is aimed specifically at dropout prevention for 100 students who go for the full day.

Despite attempts to create more intimacy, Alfred's history teacher last fall said he could only vaguely remember the teenager. The teacher, John Wage, said he has 300 students a year and keeping track of students is not his role.

"I'm not a social worker," Mr. Wage said the other day. "I don't call parents because high school students should know they should be in school and parents should know where their kids are. I don't agree with the American socialization of high schools. I have a degree in history and where I have to teach reading and writing skills I'll be happy to do that, but all those other things are part of the social welfare mentality that schools have incorporated."

The hands-off attitude expressed by Alfred's history teacher is becoming increasingly common among teachers at many inner-city high schools, according to John Devine, a New York University adjunct professor who is examining seven city high schools similar to Brandeis.

"Teachers no longer play the parental role. Intellectuals are telling teachers that they should be just like university professors and just deal with the cognitive as opposed to the body of the students," he said.

"You have teachers relinquishing their role to these outside groups, such as security guards, such as truancy sweeps, such as guidance counselors," Mr. Devine said. "Sixty years ago, all you had in a school was teachers and students."

Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company