January 21, 2004 | By MICHAEL WINERIP | New York Times

In the mid-1990's, Julia Richman High was a big bad Manhattan public school, overcrowded and plagued by violence until a group of innovative educators took over, divided the building into six small schools and turned it into a national model.

The six small schools ranged from 130 to 400 students and each had a specialty. Urban Academy took children failing at other high schools and offered small classes with seminar-style instruction - an English course on Shakespeare, a history course on the civil rights movement - that was more like college than high school. Today, 95 percent of its graduates are admitted to four year colleges.

Manhattan International High accepted only newly arrived immigrants. Korab Fazliu came four years ago from Kosovo, speaking limited English, and now as a senior is taking advanced placement calculus and struggling through "Crime and Punishment" in English. Claudia Funez arrived five years ago from Honduras, the daughter of a laborer who originally entered this country illegally. Now a Manhattan International senior, Claudia has been accepted at Brandeis University and will study medicine. So legendary is Manhattan International among immigrants, it gets three times more applicants than it can accept.

The building includes a performing arts school and a school for autistic children. And success came without skimming top students from elsewhere. The complex is mainly minority children and includes a nursery for 20 infants and toddlers - of teenage mothers attending the six schools.

In recent years the small-school movement has been at the forefront of the push to improve urban education, fueled by the Gates Foundation, which has donated $750 million to start 1,400 small schools. The first place Gates officials send their new grant winners is the Julia Richman complex. "There is not a better example in the U.S.," says Tom Vander Ark, Gates's education director. "They are remarkably good schools whose success can be measured in real-life ways, like getting kids into college."

Milwaukee officials, including the superintendent and school board members, have made three trips to Julia Richman. "Impressed? Oh yes," says Marty Lexmond, a Milwaukee official. "Because of Julia Richman and Urban Academy, we're convinced this works for urban kids. I'm planning a fourth trip, for our union leadership and principals."

Educators from around the world - Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, South Africa, Albania, Italy, France, Israel - visit Manhattan International to learn how to better educate their own recently arrived immigrants. As Gunilla Obrink, a Swedish educator, wrote, "Hopefully some of your ideas will surface at many of our schools."

So leave it to the state and federal education bureaucrats to come up with an accountability system that labeled Manhattan International a failing school, will make Urban Academy a failing school next fall and has done the same to two dozen other small New York City high schools. It is a story of arcane technicalities that has angered city officials and is worth slogging through, because it illustrates why so many have come to believe that the federal and state testing accountability systems under No Child Left Behind are mathematical hocus-pocus unrelated to real-life education.

Some history is necessary. In the mid-1990's, 30 small city schools, including 3 at Julia Richman, formed a consortium. One of their goals was to create a portfolio assessment system that would be used in place of state tests to grant diplomas. The New York education commissioner, Thomas Sobol, approved their plan, but in 1995, Richard P. Mills became commissioner. There was a time, as Vermont's education commissioner, when Mr. Mills had been a big portfolio man, but in New York, with the education winds blowing the other way, he became one of the nation's leading testing proponents. The consortium schools and the commissioner battled in court, and the commissioner won. Students in small schools had to take the same Regents tests to graduate as everyone else.

But the state allowed a transition phase. While consortium students had to take the state English test, the 30 schools could continue using portfolio assessment for math until June 2004. And if students passed their math portfolio assessment - whether their grade from their school was 98 or 68 - the state recognized them as "passing" the math diploma requirement.

And now, the technicality that magically produces failing schools. City officials counted "passing" as 65 both for students and for the purpose of rating the schools. And since most students passed, the schools had enough 65 scores to be rated as proficient in math.

Then last fall, with the new federal No Child Left Behind law, the state did the calculations. And the state decided that "passing" would equate to 60, rather than 65. It didn't affect students; they were still counted as passing the diploma requirement. But all those 30 schools that the year before had enough 65's to be rated proficient suddenly had no 65's; they had all 60's, and were rated as failing to make adequate progress.

City officials were furious. The students were passing, but the schools were failing? The city's Republican administration has been quite passive - some would say timid - about challenging the Republican president's education law. But even city officials could not put up with this. On Oct. 30, Diana Lam, a deputy chancellor, wrote a pointed letter to the state commissioner criticizing his "unfair" system.

Two months later, city officials still haven't heard back. In a brief e-mail to me, Tom Dunn, the State Education Department spokesman, said, "We have been reviewing the situation, and I do not have any further comment.''

As for the students - what do they know? - they thought they were attending terrific schools. Korab, from Kosovo, said he was amazed to have class sizes of just 25 and an English teacher, Natalie Gray, with a doctorate, who would assign Dostoyevsky. "Failing?" he repeated, "I think I will go against that. Not failing. One of the best. I feel very lucky to be in this country, at this school."

E-mail: edmike@nytimes.com