The following article is abridged from the 6/13/92 issue of "The Economist"

Public schools in NY are reinventing themselves from the inside out. The results are often astounding.

"The kids are going to have a great time," says Lorraine Munroe, headmistress of the new school, "but we're going to work the snot out of them." A likely assertion in most places; but this is central Harlem. NY's ghetto schools have plenty of challenges--too many, usually, to bother adding academic performance to the list.

It is easy to see why. NY's public school "system" has just under 1m students. The city teaches 36% of NY state's students, including 3/4 of the state's non-whites. There are 900 schools, a budget of $7 billion a year. 6000 people work for the huge bureaucracy in Brooklyn, all laying down decrees.

The result is that, before giving children the best possible education, NY's public schools are expected to carry out the bureaucracy's many "system goals". School principals must provide programmes to satisfy a welter of city, state and federal requirements. They may not hire, or fire, teachers of their choice; that is up to the head office and the unions.

Lacking control, the best that many schools can hope for is to cajole enough students into school to keep attendance records high. This usually means teachers demand little of their students if students agree not to cause trouble. It is unsurprising then, that just 54% of NY school children graduate from high school, against 73% nationwide.

So what to do? Well, over a decade ago in East Harlem, the school district had decayed so far that the school board, in effect, gave up on it. This allowed the district's schools to rearrange themselves into schools of "choice". That is students and parents could pick among schools that offered a range of teaching methods and vocational or specialized training ( known as magnet schools.). School principals, in turn, were able to control their own curriculums and to recruit the teachers they wanted.

Children were expected to work hard, and the results showed. At one school in East Harlem, 80% of the children performed above standardized reading test for their grade. Before "choice", the figure was 3%. In 1974, East Harlem was 32nd out of 32 school districts; in 1988, it had climbed to 8th.

The East Harlem model is spreading across the city. There are now 20 magnet schools, many of them on the sites of failed neighborhood high schools. The manhattan Centre for Science and Math recently replaced a basket case, the Benjamin Franklin High School. The new school graduated its entire 1st class, and sent them all to college. The earlier school graduated 7% of its students. A growing number of high schools have devoted a wing to specialized schooling, be it training in health care, finance or drama. The enthusiasm of these wings palpably affects the rest of the school.

The array of schooling options starting to become available in NY has alarmed even some of the most vocal fans of school choice, who thought the phrase signified a return to "traditional" schooling. Some are. Mrs. Munroe (who is building a high school, the Frederick Douglass Academy, from scratch) believes rigorous testing is the best means of assessment. "Munroe does not let children fail," confides an admiring teacher, "she beats them until they learn."

In Central Park East secondary school, on the other hand, classes are rowdy and chaotic. They last a half day rather than the standard 43 minutes. The classes merge a range of subjects, and the noise is just enthusiastic collaboration. Fourteen year olds show an impressive grasp of detail as they argue the merits of evolution over the 1st chapter of Genesis, or as they calculate the forces on a computer drawn suspension bridge. Yet 1/4 of them live with neither parent; 1/2 are on welfare; and all have been affected on way or another by drugs.

In aptitude tests, these schools' black students score 40% above the mean; in other neighborhood schools, 30% below.

An effective response to the urban schooling problem, therefore, already lies within its public sector. This is not lost on NY's kids. According to Robert Crain, a sociologist at Columbia, 80% apply to some kind of special public school. There is room for less than half.

The rest must attend neighborhood schools, even though these do not deserve to exist. Too bad the NYC School Board hasn't noticed that.