August 30, 1994

RAISING MATH AND SCIENCE REQUIREMENTS In two weeks, New York City high schools will begin an ambitious effort to raise the math and science requirements for nearly all its students. But there are so many hurdles -- from a lack of money for books and teacher training, to concerns about the readiness of most ninth graders for such a change -- that many parents and teachers believe the new requirements will be nearly impossible to meet. A1.

WHATEVER their political leanings, and no matter how earnest their earlier insistence that they will be delighted either way, the first thing new parents want to know when the baby debuts is, boy or girl? And most of the time, the doctor can confidently and joyfully boom out the verdict. Every so often, however, the answer is not immediately obvious. The infant may look as though it has a penis but there is little or no scrotum to be found, leading those in the delivery room to wonder whether they are seeing a boy with undescended testes or a girl with a greatly enlarged clitoris. Or it may later turn out that a newborn with the external genitals of a boy has a female's ovaries inside. As many as 1 in 1,000 babies are born with some sort of gender ambiguity, throwing the parents into an emotional maelstrom and forcing them to confront decisions like whether their child should be surgically modified and how, exactly, they should regard their androgynous offspring.

In less than two weeks, New York City high schools will begin what may be the most ambitious undertaking by a major urban school system, raising the math and science requirements for nearly all its students. But there are so many hurdles -- from a lack of money for books and training for teachers to concerns about the readiness of most ninth-graders for such a change -- that many parents and teachers believe the new requirements will be nearly impossible to meet.

Eliot L. Spitzer, looking unwithered in the rain, was working the voters of the Upper East Side, handing out his fliers and hoping to chat with anyone who recognized him. Many people did. "Cuomo's been my man," one woman said. Mr. Spitzer, always earnest, explained that he was running for New York State attorney general, not governor. "You look heavier on TV," an older man said. Mr. Spitzer, a 35-year-old former prosecutor with no political experience, is out shaking hands every day. But his real campaign is on the airwaves, where his family's real-estate fortune has bought a series of punchy political advertisements, each with a tough-on-crime message. The ads have bought this newcomer a commodity that his three Democratic rivals envy: name recognition in a race in which voters do not know who the candidates are.

Swelling with thousands of Cuban and Haitian refugees, this sprawling training base has been transformed in the last week from a tranquil pocket of Americana in the Caribbean to a place of throbbing discontent. Almost everyone here is unhappy, especially the Cubans and Haitians who fled their countries in flimsy rafts and rickety boats and who hoped or expected they would end up in the United States.