I approach "Baltimore and Beyond: A Special Report" -- published in this newspaper May 5 -- with mixed feelings. Syndicated columnist Neal Peirce and his co-author Curtis W. Johnson, head of the Minneapolis-based Citizens League, admit deliberately writing a "prickly or rawly prescriptive" summation of their impressions of the region and its needs, and its prescriptions certainly are "prickly."

For such a report, this feels, to me, unfinished. Rather than the comparative, fact-choked reportage and analysis that has made Mr. Peirce's commentaries a gospel in state and local governments across North America, "Baltimore and Beyond" reads more like a collection of first impressions. Anecdotes, tidbits and first-looks at actors and factors in a breaking story have proper places in developing a major piece of analysis. But they are not the story. They are a starting place.

What's missing is hard-headed charging through the numbers that track the changes. Who moved, how many, what potentials did this shift in the balance of economic, political and cultural power? Who needs, how much is needed, where are the reservoirs of supply? What political levers are left, for whom?

In his well-respected column, Mr. Peirce typically compares a city like Baltimore to say, St. Louis, goes to Memphis for some new ideas, crosses the Atlantic to show a different approach in Rotterdam. He brings in the national statistics to paint a backdrop, shows you where you are in relation to other cities and other areas. Not so, this time.

There's also a time to get past the statistics and the big, sweeping trends to talk to the little people affected by all the factors being sleuthed out. What's it like from their perspective? What is their perspective? What do they think should be done? What little people crept into this report?

Let's zero in on one prickly point, the contention that "Baltimore City and its neighbors . . . oftentimes exhibit sheer indifference to each other -- and, on occasion, outright hostility."

Did Mr. Peirce find this hostility in the city, or among suburbanites who know little of what actually goes on? Individuals, even groups of citizens, sometimes do exhibit such hostility, but municipal officials rarely do.

In but one example of cooperation, after last year's fractious state elections Baltimore's City Council invited members of neighboring county councils to City Hall to discuss regional issues, especially solid-waste recycling. Another is the Baltimore City-County proposal for a joint "container tax," which the City Council enacted, only to see its county counterpart suddenly shift course.

Maryland's public libraries already have a reciprocal book-lending agreement, so that a card-holder of any one can borrow materials from another. And there are regular city-county contacts on the city's water and sewage plants, which serve many suburban communities.

About the only recent time hostile, fear-ridden statements came out of a Baltimore suburb came when Baltimore County officials attacked a proposed deal to move some federal offices from the enclave on Security Boulevard to a vacant building downtown. City Hall never escalated the acrimony.

As to the fear of city officials getting "pilloried for giving up an ounce of the city's autonomy now that blacks are finally in full control," it was a nice image, but the facts don't bear it out. Mr. Peirce and Mr. Johnson would do well to study the recent state takeover of Baltimore's municipal jail and the Community College of Baltimore.

Then there is the "onus on Baltimore City to change." It must "earn outsiders' support by radically improving its schools."

Let's look at some of those numbers I mentioned earlier. A bTC Gallup poll reported that more than 80 percent of the American public believed education must be improved in poor communities and that a majority was willing to pay higher taxes to achieve this goal. That's in the abstract, and Marylanders probably agreed with it.

Confronted with an actual demand to raise taxes for education, however, the Maryland General Assembly in March defeated the Linowes commission proposals to do just that. It was pretty clear at the time that the legislators had their pulse on the public's reaction, too, after a contentious election brought to the fore vociferous opponents of raising taxes for any purpose.

Baltimore's schools desperately need new funding if they ar ever to fulfill the expectations Mr. Peirce and Mr. Johnson found in the suburbs, however. One indicator of the city's willingness to improve its schools is putting its money where its mayor's mouth is. The Schmoke administration has managed to find more money for the schools every year, starting with a 1989 move, when Mr. Schmoke was mayor-elect, to add $18.6 million in city funds to a school budget which was below $400 million but now stands at $540 million from all sources.

One criticism heard often from legislators from outside Baltimore, echoed in "Baltimore and Beyond," is that the city's school bureaucracy is the big obstacle. First, it should be recognized that William Donald Schaefer built that bureaucracy, not Kurt L. Schmoke. Mr. Schaefer, the do-it-now mayor, could presumably have gotten his schools administration to do whatever he wanted. How is it that his City Hall, so much more competent than Kurt Schmoke's in Mr. Peirce's view, left office with the schools in a mess in the first place?

Moreover, the belief that Baltimore's school administrators do little to earn their pay needs serious re-examination in light of the Fund for Educational Excellence's recent "Lessons of Change." Among other things, the report shows how political mandates, not bureaucratic thrusts, have exercised successive school boards and superintendents to reshape the schools so many times that turmoil itself has worked against improvement.

As it happens, Baltimore's central school administration group is small, numbering about 260 people. Add secretaries and support staff, and you're talking about roughly 500 people. That's too few people to spend all the money that goes into the schools.

"Lessons of Change" did criticize the ballooning of the non-teaching staff since 1948, but school administrators say much of that growth has resulted from major lawsuits against the city schools, mandating addition of specific, non-teaching programs.

Moreover, non-teaching assistants, security guards and other non-teaching personnel appeared in urban schools across the nation during the 1970s and '80s, long after the tranquil school environment of the late 1940s had vanished. Few schools in Baltimore County or Prince George's County, with which the city schools are often compared, operate in areas as congested or as busy with foot traffic as the typical inner-city school.

And frankly, Mr. Peirce's proposition that money should not be spent on Baltimore's schools because the "student peer pressure telegraphs the insane message that it's stupid to study too hard" is pretty strange itself. Students may face negative peer pressure anywhere, but the answer is not to deny them resources they need to gain a solid education. Instead, some of that money could be spent working, as in the programs conducted by Yale child psychiatrist James P. Comer, to counteract the social ills that generate negative pressures.

I could go on like this, but I might lose sight of the forest: that Baltimore's educational problems are symptomatic of larger, regional problems. Not that long ago, a national survey reported that this metropolitan region lagged behind almost all of its peers in adult high-school completion rates, and that was not solely due to the city. And the Maryland Higher Education Commission's recent report by the Task Force on High #i Technology Occupations underscored that when it called for massive adult re-education and skills training, among a comprehensive list of new educational efforts the state -- not the city -- should make.

Real regional cooperation must begin with the realization that, with 418,000 suburbanites coming into the city every day to work and with city people moving across county lines to work, shop, seek entertainment or visit relatives, the city's problems are everyone else's, too. It cannot proceed without an extension of real respect for the people who live and work every day in the city and struggle to compensate for its weaknesses and improve the quality of life for everyone.

That's lacking in "Baltimore and Beyond," and it is disturbing in what that implies about the mindset of many of the leaders identified as having been interviewed. There are many others to whom Mr. Peirce and Mr. Johnson could have talked, and they probably would have given very different opinions.

Among others, they include union leaders representing the city's 90,000 trade unionists, community activists like Bob Kaufman and his City-Wide Insurance Coalition, which now has support from 145 organizations, and more of the city's black religious leaders, who have as fine an understanding of its problems as anyone.

For that matter, Mr. Peirce and Mr. Johnson could have talked to many of the educators for whom they purport to write prescriptions. Add in the leaders and teachers at Coppin State College, Morgan State and the New Community College, who each year complete the educations of large numbers of the students who come out of Baltimore's schools. What they could have learned would go a long way toward dispelling the stereotypes that disturbed me and so many other people, reprinted in their report.

You get the idea. Too many elements were left out of this prickly prescription for me to have faith in it. And coming from no less than Neal Peirce, that's a big disappointment.