August 1, 1993

JULIETTA ACKERMAN and Marguerite Tirelli recalled the high-powered couple who phoned Beyond Birth, their new business, for help but were so frantic they forgot to leave their name and telephone number on either their first or second message. Nothing in the corporate world prepares such parents for the 7-pound bundles whose only communication is a heart-rending howl when they want something. Mrs. Ackerman reached the new parents by calling someone she knew who had said she was referring a couple to them.

Special Today: Education Life/Section 4A The fight over national standards: What happens to local control? Plus the the following special reports: * Are blacks on campus excluded? * Parents and schools go to court: Student rights v. discipline and control. * The quiz: Getting from here to there.

PRESIDENT CLINTON'S plan for reviving the economy, embodied in his budget proposals, is squeaking through Congress. Even so, the President in one important sense has lost the battle. Like a general forced to call off a cavalry charge, he has given up his original strategy. Instead, President Clinton is proclaiming the same hard-nosed economic propositions that George Bush and Ronald Reagan proclaimed as their guiding principle. The irony is that Mr. Clinton, like his Republican predecessors, has locked himself into an economic theory that works in the imagination but perhaps not in practice.

It isn't all Bill Clinton's fault. Not by a long way. The President's protracted, messy effort to push his economic program through Congress, still hung up short of success this weekend, is taken in some Washington circles and by many rank-and-file voters as evidence of ineptitude if not incompetence. There is no doubt that the White House has made its share of mistakes in this campaign, on which the very definition of the Clinton Administration may turn.

Could the fourth time be the charm for the former United Nations School at First Avenue and 51st Street? New York City officials have tried for a decade to find a developer who would preserve the exterior of this handsome 103-year-old Romanesque Revival structure. Three auctions have failed to make a successful match. Tomorrow, the city's Economic Development Corporation will issue a request for proposals, rather than going to auction. Under the new guidelines, a developer would have to preserve and maintain the old facade but would be allowed to exploit the full zoning potential of the site, adding up to 106,500 square feet to the existing 42,000-square-foot structure. That could yield a tower of 15 to 20 stories over the four-story school building.