Academic Rigor Is Focus in Conn.

"We don't accept any excuses," said Stephen Buchner, who taught at an unruly elementary school in the District before transferring this year to Achievement First's new elementary school in New Haven, a sister school to Amistad. "When a teacher is speaking, everybody has to have their eyes on the teacher. That starts from Day One. If it doesn't happen, there is a consequence."

A peek inside Kim Mowery's sixth-grade science class illustrates some of the techniques used by Amistad teachers. Prowling the classroom like a drill sergeant, she barks out questions to the students to determine how much they have absorbed from the previous lesson. Correct answers are rewarded with red raffle tickets, part of an elaborate incentive system that can result in extra field trips or punishment such as more homework.

"Come on, people -- we are losing time," she snaps, as students struggle to explain the functioning of the human eye. "You have to earn the right to visit the lab."

To thrive at Amistad, students often cut themselves off from friends and neighbors. "It's hard to stay in touch with other friends once you are here," says Alexandria Blackwood, 13, whose prize possession is a special eighth-grade pin, one of Amistad's highest honors. Students who wear the pin are permitted to eat lunch in a special room and walk school hallways unmonitored.

What is surprising is that the students seem to buy into the system and strive for small status symbols, such as the pin. "In the beginning, it was hard to adjust," said Laqueria Davis, an eighth-grader. "I would snap at people and be sent to the dean's office. But you get used to it."

As a charter school, Amistad is part of the New Haven public school system but has greater freedom than regular schools to recruit teachers and establish its curriculum and disciplinary standards. But it is required to admit students by lottery, rather than cherry-pick those most likely to succeed. Last year, there were 500 applications for 70 slots.

Critics say, however, that the lottery provides an initial screening of students. Only the most motivated parents apply for openings at the school, they suggest. Some have also questioned whether the school can replicate itself elsewhere as it tries to expand. McCurry acknowledges that "the limiting factor" is the ability to recruit top-notch teachers.

Standardized test results suggest that Amistad students are catching up with, and in many cases overtaking, white students. In 2003, for example, 81 percent of Amistad eighth-graders achieved "mastery" in reading on the state test, compared with 31 percent of students in New Haven and 67 percent statewide. Two years earlier, in sixth grade, the same students had lagged behind their statewide counterparts by 38 percent to 64 percent.

Over the past five years, McCurry said, Amistad and similar schools have changed the nationwide conversation about closing the achievement gap -- "from if it can be done to how it can be done."