Test scores rose among all grade levels last year. And the district completed an ambitious summer school programme for 24,000 low-achieving students, aimed at boosting their math and reading levels and ending ``social promotion''.

Let's not get carried away, though. The district's school reforms are not yet going to bring suburban parents back to the city. The 77,000-student system still lacks true accountability and high standards--the two ingredients, everyone agrees, that are essential for healthy schools.

Social promotion hasn't ended; only a fraction of the students in danger of repeating another grade were held back for this academic year. And most bad teachers won't get fired; Ackerman's plan to solve thisproblem, asking principals and teachers to work together to establish performance guidelines, too easily assumes that principals will sack teachers.

Such faintheartedness was once cause for pessimism. But now, with Anthony Williams installed as mayor, there are real grounds for hope. Beginning in January, the control board will begin returning the reins of government to the mayor and, gradually, to the schools. The 11-member elected school board is slated to regain its authority in 2001. Williams, who fired 1,800 city employees in order to close a budget deficit, might be just the man to overhaul the system.

To enact real reform, Williams needs to make another tough decision: He should copy Chicago's 1995 school reforms--probably the most successful and most imitated of recent big-city school overhauls. Chicago pioneered the policy of ending social promotions and providing summer school for troubled students. Now, high school graduation rates (65 per cent) and elementary student test scores in math (44per cent scoring at or above national norms) are at 10-year highs.

Chicago's reforms are working for many reasons. The city has hired two top-notch school officials, Paul Vallas and Gery Chico, and it subscribes to a neo-liberal philosophy that stresses opportunity and high standards. But the key reform has been administrative: The mayor now has primary control over the schools, not local and citywide school boards. (Not all power in Chicago has been centralised. In 1988, Chicago granted some authority over hiring of principals and funding to local school bodies; these bodies still exist).

The main assumption here is that urban school systems, which serve primarily students from poor families, benefit more from government intervention than local control. The reforms, with their emphasis on basics and discipline, have been called right-wing, but that's not really true--at least not in the usual sense. Chicago's school system is now spending more money and has increased the scope of government.

It will betough for the district to adopt the Chicago model because it will require a body blow to the DC political system. Several local school bodies would have to be remade; the incoming elected school board would have to be defanged; the mayor would have to appoint its members. Not surprisingly, as comments by DC Council member Kevin Chavous indicate, such a plan wouldn't be imposed without a fight. But it's important to take a broader view. As Chicago's reforms shows, there are good reasons why the board should be remade. The first reason is administrative. It's simply easier to reform the schools when only a couple of people are in charge.

For at least 20 years, DC's school system has had the reverse situation: There are so many people with authority, it's easy to pass the buck. Up until 1995, Chicago's school system was also marred by buck-passing. Inge Fryklund, a former city consultant, called the school district a ``non-system in which no one was responsible for anything''. But when the Illinois statelegislature intervened and Mayor Richard M Daley somewhat grudgingly accepted responsibility for the school system, Chicago's public schools finally turned around. Daley handpicked Vallas and Chico--both old Daley hands--to head the school district, and also chose five allies to fill the new five-member school board.

While it is possible that Chicago's elected school board could have overhauled the schools, the recent history of big-city school reform shows that it does not happen that way. In every urban school system that's been reformed during the 1980s and 1990s--in San Francisco, Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, DC--the impetus to reform has come either through a court order or a higher legislative body. Says Dan Lewis, an education and social policy professor at Northwestern University: ``I think centralisation ...had to happen because you had 540 local school boards saying, `We need someone in charge'.''

Vallas and Chico did take charge. One of their first steps was to use those emergency powers tocrack down on bad teachers and principals. Vallas and Chico ``reconstituted'' or remade schools--meaning that teachers at lousy schools had to reapply for their jobs. In 1997, seven schools were remade.

Almost a third of the teachers, 183 of 646, got pink slips, and five principals were replaced. This was crucial because, as a new University of Tennessee study has shown, teachers are considered the single biggest determinant of a student's success.

I was able to get a sense of a school run by centralised control when I visited Orr High School on the city's west side. The school was reconstituted in the fall of 1997 and is situated in a troubled neighbourhood; there have been five shootings near campus this decade. At the time, the Chicago Sun-Times had called it ``possibly the worst run and least successful school not only in Chicago but all of Illinois''. Among its problems: Orr's last principal, Cynthia Felton, was found to have spent $100,000 in 1996 and 1997 on staff junkets, including one $9,600 tripto Las Vegas for a ``computer conference''. Felton was dismissed.

Vallas intervened at Orr. He hired Joyce Johnson, a principal for 13 years, who had a reputation for what Vallas called ``really being a taskmaster''. Staff trips are now monitored. More importantly, she moved quickly to shore up the school's academics. Because reconstitution had wiped out almost 40 per cent of Orr's staff, Johnson's main job has been to bring 50 new teachers on board. Barbara Radner, a DePaul University education professor hired by the city two years ago to monitor Orr, says Johnson has created a new climate: ``This year, we have far more competent teachers. The school has basically become reorganised. A system of accountability is in place. The teaching staff got the word, if they don't want to get in the pathway, they should get out... But we also have teachers staying voluntarily once a week to implement these strategies. It's now teachers collaborating with each other and, in fact, that's our big shift.''

Radner isright: Orr has improved academically. Last spring, the school tripled its scores in reading and almost doubled them in math; more than 11 per cent of its freshmen are now at or above national standards in those subjects. Of course, these numbers are still low, but they do signal improvement.