THE DIFFICULTY FACING HARTFORD, Connecticut, is by now a familiar one: an inner-city public school system burdened by structural decay and besieged by the pathologies of urban poverty. But while money certainly seems in short supply, what is more troubling here is the isolation in which Hartford's students--94% of them African American or Hispanic, nearly 3 out of 4 poor, with a high school dropout rate more than three times the state average--find themselves: a sort of walled city, separated from less troubled suburbs by an invisible color line drawn not by law but by decades of white flight.
Though the...
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