HARTFORD, Conn. -- In barrooms and in classrooms, on street corners and on radio call-in shows, in the poorest neighborhoods and in the offices of power brokers, Baltimore's pioneering school privatization venture is the talk of this town.

The experiment that began two years ago in nine schools hundreds of miles away, stands at the center of a war here over control of the poverty-racked state capital's ailing school district. The battle pits the powerful, 850,000-member American Federation of Teachers union against Education Alternatives Inc., the Minnesota company that wants to manage Hartford's 32 public schools and $171.1 million school budget.

With all the trappings of a political campaign, two radically different versions of reality have saturated this city in a gaggle of sound bites, multimillion-dollar ad campaigns, emotional outbursts, claims and counterclaims.

In what is viewed as a national test on school privatization, both sides point to Baltimore's experiment. Supporters, many persuaded by Baltimore Superintendent Walter G. Amprey's testimonials here on EAI's behalf, see the experiment as an educational miracle in the making. Opponents call it a sham motivated by greed.

"This debate isn't just about the Hartford school system," said John B. O'Connell, a Republican on the City Council here. "This debate is about the direction and control of education for the '90s in America."

The teachers union sees EAI as part of an ominous movement toward abdicating public responsibility for public schools and pumping millions in taxpayers' money into an untested venture. Many teachers also view privatization as a direct threat to jobs, despite assurances none would be lost.

For EAI, Hartford represents a potential gateway to broad expansion and new contracts worth millions of dollars. Despite nationwide marketing and negotiations with more than a dozen school districts, EAI has yet to win a contract outside Baltimore since taking on the "Tesseract" schools in 1992.

The fate of the Hartford district now rests with the City Council, which must approve any contract to run the schools. After a 7-2 school board vote last Tuesday setting guidelines on hiring an outside company, the council now begins preparing requests for bids. EAI hopes to sign a five-year contract by July 1.

"A lot of people have suggested we can improve our schools by ourselves, but the fact is, if we could have, we would have long ago," said school board member Ted Carroll. "We concluded we need a new model for operating our school system."

Four blocks from Hartford's skyscrapers sits a mud-colored complex that houses a social service agency, a decrepit public library and the main building of the poorest school in the poorest city in Connecticut.

Inside the Sand School in the city's tough North End, the battered beige walls haven't seen fresh paint in years. Furniture is scarred and stained; the few carpets frayed or falling apart. Tattered books, most of them decades old, fill a tiny library.

And in the hallway, samples of students' writing hang on the wall. The title of the class exercise: "How it Makes Me Feel When There are Termites in My Classroom."

Outside, in the shadows of brick tenements, the playground offers little escape from the urban ravages. Earlier this school year, parents collected what children at play picked up -- then handed school board members a bag full of the syringes and spent bullet casings.

All of which makes Susie B. Hinton wince.

"How long would you be willing to stand and hit your head against that wall, recognizing that each blow is going to cause pain?" says Ms. Hinton, the Sand School's principal. "That's what we've been doing for decades with public education."

She welcomes EAI's bid, she says, because without outside help, the downward spiral will continue. Ms. Hinton says she finds particularly appealing EAI's emphasis on repairing schools, involving parents and developing "personal education plans" tailored to each child's needs and progress.

"For the first time in my 30 years in Hartford, I feel like we're being forced to center our attention on children and make children the center of what we're about," she says. "The debate -- all that's going on right now -- is going on because we have failed in our efforts for children."

The failure extends throughout Connecticut's largest school district. Standardized test scores consistently rank worst in the state. Half of the students who enter high school never graduate, and 75 percent are considered "at-risk" of not graduating and failing to acquire basic skills needed to get a job or go to college.

Because of a perennial shortage of cash, decrepit schools have gone without basic repairs for years, and budget cuts have eliminated hundreds of positions, staff development and programs such as dropout-prevention and remedial reading.

Meanwhile, urban ills -- gang violence, poverty, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, unemployment -- make the schools' job that much harder. In a district that is 43 percent black and 45 percent Hispanic, six children in 10 live in low-income, single-parent households.

Lisa Beaudoin, the parent of a first-grader, says, "Here in Hartford, we're so desperate. To us, if the only thing EAI does is come in and clean up the schools and leave, that's more than we have.

"Our kids are so deprived, and there's more budget cuts every year, so anything's better than what we have. Our teachers have failed. Our system has failed. It's like everyone has thrown their hands up in the air and said these kids can't learn."

Such frustration made this city a prime target for EAI.

When John T. Golle, the company's chairman and chief executive, arrived in this city of 140,000 early this year, he spoke of the unthinkable -- at least for Hartford, at least for the past quarter-century.

Imagine, he said, $20 million from EAI for long-overdue renovations and repairs, a whole district full of shiny, safe schools, four computers to a classroom, and guaranteed improvements in test scores. Capitalism, he told anyone who would listen, can do all of this.

Many parents, as well as a few principals and teachers, found the overture hard to resist.

But along Forest Street, a block from the house Mark Twain called home for 17 years, huge white placards hung from trees last week. Inside a red circle were the letters "EAI" with a slash through them.

In front of Hartford Public High School, America's second oldest, union leaders and teachers stood on a 50-foot flatbed truck and shouted into microphones. The 400 people, most of them teachers and other school employees, took the cue, chanting, "Take no bids, no profit from our kids!"

Dismissing EAI's Baltimore venture as an unproven experiment, Jeanne Spencer, president of the Hartford Federation of Teachers, said, "If EAI, after five years, has done a bang-up job in Baltimore, then look us up. But until then, don't use our kids as guinea pigs."

The rally came just days after the AFT launched an ad campaign proclaiming the for-profit company's school-privatization venture in Baltimore a failure. Full-page ads in the Hartford Courant and hundreds of mailings to parents carried much the same message: "The Hartford School Board Wants to Experiment on Your Child."

Not to be outdone, EAI hired a local public relations firm and countered with a radio ad campaign attacking the union's credibility and motives. Teachers, the company says, fear success -- EAI's, that is -- and see in privatization a threat to a local union representing teachers who make an average of $53,200 a year, among the nation's highest, despite the dismal school performance.

"EAI," one of its three radio ads says, "is accountable to the most important group of all: the kids of Hartford. That's accountability rarely found in public schools today." The announcer then urges listeners to call a toll-free number to ask questions, before adding, "What's at stake is too important not to know the truth."

EAI claims that it cuts red tape and spends less in the classroom. In reality, the Baltimore school system spent more for the nine Tesseract schools, but EAI spent less in classrooms -- $2.5 million less for regular and special education. The union points out that standardized test scores declined, but fails to mention that the tests had been given only weeks after EAI's computers arrived in the classroom.

The Baltimore record, says William Meagher, the Hartford school board president, should trouble this city's leaders.

"If they're handling nine schools and have a problem, how are they going to handle a whole district?" he says. "They haven't proven themselves yet, and they seem to want to rush this thing before too many facts come out."

For its part, EAI says the union has exaggerated first-year growing pains, and that the Baltimore experiment is remaking schools and reversing decades of decline.

The Baltimore record, says parent Patrice Villalobos, should hearten Hartford and inspire its leaders to strive for the same success.

She went to Baltimore about a month ago, along with 45 other parents, teachers, school board members and lawmakers, to see Tesseract schools up close. She liked what she saw.

"EAI could make our schools more efficient, and bring a lot more resources at a lower cost. A lot of our kids live in rundown, dirty neighborhoods. At least give them something six hours a day that's clean, a place where they can feel good about themselves."