Federation of Connecticut Taxpayer Organizations

Monday, as thousands of children begin the school year, the Hartford school system will begin the first major phase of an ambitious reform plan designed to transform the way 24,000 children in the state's poorest city are educated.

The lowest-performing schools in the district have been shut down and reincarnated with different teachers and new educational philosophies.

And new schools are opening, based on models that have worked elsewhere, including the acclaimed Amistad Academy in New Haven and the rigorous International Baccalaureate curriculum used worldwide.

Some schools will have longer days and even classes on Saturdays.

Hartford Public High School has been transformed from a traditional, comprehensive high school to a collection of smaller academies with specialized focuses like nursing and green technologies.

Many more schools are beginning the year under some form of monitoring, with the eventual threat of redesign or other consequences if they fail to make enough progress in student performance.

And parents will gain a measure of control under a school choice program that began in two grades this year, and will expand throughout the district next year.

The man behind the changes, schools chief Steven J. Adamowski, arrived in Hartford two years ago with blunt words about the public school system's failures and promises for sweeping changes. His efforts to close the persistent achievement gap, one of many similar efforts in cities nationwide, are being watched closely.

Others have promised change in Hartford before, only to find themselves overwhelmed by poverty, despair, politics and persistently low student performance. In the past two decades, the district has been through private management, a state takeover and a series of superintendents with different visions and attempted solutions.

This time, supporters say, the plan can bring meaningful change, enough to raise achievement in a district where 90 percent of the students live in poverty, where only 45 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in reading and 64 percent of ninth-graders don't get a diploma in four years.

But critics point to potential stumbling blocks they say could undermine the changes.

Some parents and teachers complain that they don't feel respected by the administration or included in the decision-making. Some parents have wondered if, beneath the broad strokes, the details are in place. And, in spite of teacher and staff layoffs over the summer, the district will begin the school year with a deficit.

Either way, the stakes are high � something Adamowski underlined in an address to area business leaders earlier this month. By 2020, an estimated 40 percent of the state's jobs will be held by people educated in urban schools.

"There is no way that we can support the economy in our state the way we know it today," he said, "without students in our urban areas doing well."

Accountability

The latest Hartford reforms are intended to solve a problem that has bedeviled high-poverty, urban school systems for years: While student performance has often improved in small pockets, raising performance significantly across the board has remained largely elusive.

Officials in Hartford are trying to break that barrier using a theory of urban school reform that treats a district as a decentralized collection of diverse schools, rather than a uniform school system run on a single model. Schools that perform well are given autonomy, schools that don't do well receive more oversight and those that fail to improve sufficiently get replaced.

Similar philosophies underlie the school rebuilding effort in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as well as reforms in Boston, Chicago, New York and other cities.

Paul T. Hill, who is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington and who developed the model in use in New Orleans, described it as a "common-sense approach" that calls for districts to improve schools any way they can. Schools that are performing well shouldn't be thrown out in the name of transforming an entire district, the thinking goes, but other models that work, including those run by outside groups, should be embraced, too.

Robert Peterkin, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of the Urban Superintendents Program, said the widespread adoption of the idea probably stems from frustration with the limits of previous efforts nationwide.

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