Harvard has launched a concerted drive to improve public school education in the Boston area as part of a broad national effort to reverse a 20-year period of non cooperation between major universities and primary and secondary schools.

The University's rejuvenated program for assisting public schools includes personal consulting by President Bok and a variety of projects under the supervision of Patricia A. Graham, dean of the Graduate School of Education.

"People at Harvard realize that improving the [public] schools in a serious issue for society," Graham said recently. "We have an obligation to take a look at schools to see how to make things better for the people in them."

20-Year Trend

Recent attempts by Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other major universities to bolster public schools have ended two decades of frustrating, unproductive relations between higher education and the schools, experts have said.

The rift, which developed by the early 1960s, resulted from "a lack of dialogue between higher and lower education," said Robert Hochstein, director of communications for the Carnegie Foundation. The foundation sponsors a blue-ribbon panel on public education, which includes Bok and other university presidents.

As part of his work for the two-year-old Carnegie panel. Bok "visits schools throughout the country to see first hand what has been going on, providing ideas and thoughts on what can be done to improve public education," Hochstein said.

Hochstein emphasized that university attention to public education is largely "based upon concern of the type of student arriving on campus."

Bok, who is on vacation, could not be reached for comment.

Harvard's Ed School this summer initiated the Boston Harvard School Development Project to "provide support to principals and make schools more effective," said Susan M. Johnson, program coordinator for the University.

Principals enrolled in the program attend seminars at the Ed School's Principals' Center and consult regularly with Ed School professors. The Ed School is now considering a broader program to establish a network of such centers across the country, Johnson said.

Similar efforts are underway at Yale's Teachers' Institute Said Institute Director James R. Vivian: "We are on the threshold of a time when universities across the country realize that it is very important that we be engaged in secondary education."