..." When he walks to work (and he does) he often has the “Mission Impossible” theme music playing in his head." ... By Benjamin Wachs

Newly appointed -- and anointed -- San Francisco Schools Superintendent Carlos Garcia is making the media rounds this week. He’s at the unenviable point where he’s late to meetings with reporters because he’s stuck in meetings with reporters. Trust me when I tell you: my colleague and I aren’t that much fun to hang out with.

He’s wearing it well, coming across as a “can-do,” unsinkable, optimist. His common-sense approach to answering questions and his happy-smiling progressivism should play well with the public.

But this weekend he faces a much tougher crowd, as he and the School Board go “in retreat” to figure out what to actually do with the school district now that he’s in charge. Enrollment is declining, charter schools are a bigger presence then ever, and state and federal mandates are getting pushier every year. Over the weekend, Garcia and the board hope to set goals, come up with plans, and figure out how to evaluate whether Garcia’s doing his job.

Normally, this shouldn’t be a tough room for Garcia; he’s been on the job for less than a week and the bloom is still fresh on the rose. His assistants are still figuring out where to hang the district’s “Flag of Racial Unity.” You can’t get tough on a man before he’s hung his flag of racial unity.

But Garcia says his number one priority is to do something that San Francisco institutions are notoriously bad at -- the one thing that doesn’t come naturally to the concerned, progressive, school district that hired him.

Focus and be practical.

“We need to set achievable goals and get everyone on the same page,” he told me. “We can’t take a shotgun approach. There’s too many issues we care about. If we target our resources, we can make a real difference on some of them. But we can’t try to solve all of them now.”

I admit, I raised my eyebrows. “You know … that doesn’t come naturally to us, right?” I asked. “You know we’re really not very good at that.”

He laughed. “I was just telling somebody that earlier! It’s true, we’re not very good at it. But it’s just essential. Because I know that every other week someone’s going to come to a meeting with a new agenda. We need to know: what’s our agenda? You ask me what my priorities are? That’s it. I want to bring focus.”

He said it again. “I want to bring focus.”

That’s his target for this weekend, and while he can’t say what the School Board will want its top priorities to be (“I don’t know them very well yet, and they don’t know me very well, either,” he admits) he hopes they will include the achievement gap between minority and majority students, and improving the district’s graduation rate, now estimated at about 74%.

The graduation rate, he said, is probably the most obvious and direct way to tell if the district’s doing something right: keeping more kids in school is always a sign that something works.

It’s an open question whether the school board -- and the public -- will support a superintendent who says that not every priority can be top priority. That’s all well and good in principle, but what happens when your priority is put on the back burner? Traditionally, in these parts, people start protesting.

Garcia, though, is optimistic. Always optimistic. In fact, he says, public education is inherently optimistic: you believe you can change children’s lives for the better. When he walks to work (and he does) he often has the “Mission Impossible” theme music playing in his head. Each day, he thinks he’s going to win.