NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- He fought in school hallways. He got high before the first class started. He told teachers in none-too-polite terms he'd rather be elsewhere.

The responses grew familiar: a stern lecture from the principal and a suspension, another three days off from school.

A year later, in another public high school a few miles away, Mike Walker didn't get off so easy. He made the mistake of bringing marijuana to school this spring, and it got him six days of tough manual labor on a nearby farm, followed by an intensive "debriefing" and self-examination.

It's called "outposting," and it's all about building character, the Hyde School way.

Last fall, the nonprofit, 28-year-old boarding school based in Bath, Maine, brought its "Character First" doctrine -- develop character, and academics follow naturally -- and its college-preparatory program to a New Haven public school. The troubled city opened the New Hyde Leadership School as part of a three-year experiment, starting with 125 ninth- and 10th-graders.

Now, Baltimore wants to follow that example, but on a much bigger scale, by letting Hyde run 1,800-student Patterson High.

Superintendent Walter G. Amprey, who has turned to private companies to help rebuild ailing city schools, hopes Hyde can revive Patterson. But he needs state approval -- which could come this week -- because Patterson in East Baltimore faces possible state takeover after years of worsening academic performance, dropout rates and attendance.

Hyde's premise, says founder Joseph W. Gauld, is simple: Stop focusing so much on subjects and focus instead on the students. Challenge them and teach them to challenge one another, recognize that each has unique gifts, get a commitment from them and hold them to it.

All of which public schools have failed to do, says Mr. Gauld: "We've got the wrong system in American education. We need a revolution."

The revolution of this veteran teacher has proved remarkably successful in the sheltered nest of the 200-student Maine boarding school, founded for teens who struggled or failed in more traditional schools. About 97 percent of its students -- more than a few of whom had battled drugs, alcohol, depression -- go on to four-year colleges.

Now Mr. Gauld is taking on perhaps his toughest challenge. He's out to prove that inner-city public schools can find salvation in Hyde's rigorous program, built around an 8 1/2 -hour school day; an advanced curriculum; required performing arts and athletics; and heavy doses of values for teens and their parents.

For the New Haven teens, it began last summer at Hyde's Maine campus, long before anybody cracked a book or pondered a math problem. There, to learn trust and self-confidence, the students endured a challenging high ropes course, walked through the woods blindfolded following a companion, and fell backward into the arms of classmates.

During that orientation and in the nine months since, the students wrote daily in journals, talked at length about their "inner feelings," sang solo on a stage in front of all their classmates. And they learned by heart Hyde's values: "Courage. Integrity. Concern for Others. Curiosity. Leadership."

Today, the students repeat the words like a mantra. And they speak of their days in "public school" in the past tense, a distant memory, in almost every case, a bad memory.

Mike Walker, who wears his sandy hair in a short pony tail, says he probably would have left school for good by now if not for Hyde.

"In public school," he says, "they just let you do what you want. It was like nobody really cared about you, and nobody set me in the right direction. Here, this school showed me they won't give up on me, that they care about me."

It's performing arts time -- the students get no fewer than two hours of it a day -- when Mike snaps a drum stick against the snare while his buddy picks out the riff from Nirvana's "Come As You Are" on an electric guitar.

Mike chuckles as he recalls the dean of discipline talking to him before his trip to the farm in April.

"You're on the farm," he was told, "until your attitude is up to snuff." After much sweating, soul-searching, counseling and journal writing, he returned, swearing off pot, vowing to live up to potential he seemed the last to discover.

Talks of college

If not for this place, he says, he could well have spent a lifetime doing manual labor. Now, on this day, in this room with so many others once written off as failures, he says his grades have improved, and he talks of college.

It's good to be here, he says, and it's good to be back from the farm.

On a sultry spring morning, Tommy Chavis-Peace slouches in a chair by an open window in English class, staring at walls and the parking lot and the floor and almost anything but his dozen classmates.

He doesn't know the plot, doesn't know the page, he doesn't even know the characters. This upsets Christine Gildy and her classmates to no end -- and abruptly halts discussion of the novel "The Learning Tree." For a half hour.

Christine -- who's running the class today, as students routinely do here -- sighs, exasperated.

"What's wrong with you, Tommy? You been doing this for the last couple weeks, just doing nothing, like you don't know what's going on."

"Nothing," he deadpans. "I want you all just to get off my back."

Students at the desks, which are arranged in a circle, speak to him.

"Why we on your back?"

"Tommy, it's like you want to think you're cool. But not doing your work like this, like laughing and giggling, the way you're going, you ain't cool. It seems like you lost it."

Tommy, a slight, handsome boy with a baby face and peach fuzz, sits and sulks.

His classmates immediately call a "concern meeting," where staff and students and Tommy will do their best to get at the root of his lapses.

They'll try to hold him to his "own best effort," a refrain heard constantly here. It's part of Hyde's "Brother's Keeper" idea -- that everyone is responsible for helping others do their best -- and the students do not take it lightly.

This is the Hyde way: students running the classes, encouraging and correcting their classmates, enforcing an honor code.

It's a radical notion, says John Russell, a veteran inner-city school teacher who teaches Tommy's English class.

"You never see that sort of exchange in a public school setting," he says after the students grill Tommy. "They know here they can deal with it. I found if you deal with the attitudes, learning comes easy."

Even for some of those who always associated school with failure, who grew up in neighborhoods ruled by gangs, who now move between two worlds when they board a school bus each morning.

Between two worlds

Mr. Russell knows well what's at stake for these teen-agers. He knows what many of them go home to each night when they leave this two-story, former Catholic school building in the suburbs.

"They wake up in gunfire; they don't know if they're going to live from one minute to the next," Mr. Russell says. "They got gangs all around them all the time. . . . These same kids are trying to get an edge, and they go right back into that culture every day: shoot, cut, duck and dodge. But they're here, changing some of the attitudes."

The conflicting messages present almost a daily dilemma for Tommy, the pensive and, of late, inattentive boy who lives in one of New Haven's toughest neighborhoods. When he goes back home and tells his buddies about his school, they laugh at him.

"They say, 'Hey, man, why don't you just go away and go back into your fantasy world?' They don't listen, they don't listen," he says.

"They think I think I'm better than them. I guess all of us really don't have the same advantages. They're going to end up in jail or dead, that's all."

A few hours later, Ray Campbell strums a slow, bluesy "Revolution" at the front of a classroom. By day, he teaches history and leads teen-agers in song. Tonight, in this stuffy room, the parents' turn to sing together and to consider their history.

As he and a parent sing the chorus, the talk in the room turns to the '60s, Woodstock, Vietnam and values, palpable anger spilling into the streets, confrontations with the National Guard and lessons that transcend generations.

The parents have gathered to select songs and vignettes and anecdotes for a year-ending school show. At Hyde, understand, everybody performs. Parents are no exception.

When their children signed a pledge, each of the parents did, too. Like their children, they promised to live and learn within Hyde's code of conduct and values.

More than test scores or attendance or the number of suspensions, the commitment to that pledge, for both parent and child, determined which of the 300 students who applied filled the 125 spots.

For parents, the commitment means "encounter groups" and painful journeys back to their own teen-age years and all those since. It means keeping journals and climbing ropes and promising to attend meetings, weekend retreats and parenting seminars.

About half the parents have kept their agreement, but almost all have participated in some gatherings.

Not everybody's a convert, however. Some parents dismissed Hyde's rigid strictures as "brainwashing," or "cult-like" adherence highly unusual practices. Since September, about 25 parents have moved their children from Hyde back to more traditional public schools.

First experiment ended

Hyde's first experiment in public schools, a program in a Gardiner, Maine, high school, ended in 1992 after only a few months because teachers protested the program's demands and intense work. Some taxpayers rallied behind the teachers. Signs appeared on front lawns, likening Hyde to a cult and urging passing motorists, "Honk if you Hate Hyde."

None of which surprises Joe Gauld much.

At a time when brokering the latest educational miracle has become a cottage industry, he promises a slow fix -- and predicts resistance like few have ever seen in schools.

If Hyde takes control of Patterson, some parents will call it a manipulative social experiment. Most students will scoff at the lofty talk of values and principles.

And some teachers, Mr. Gauld says, will cry foul about longer hours and more demanding work. The Baltimore Teachers Union is fighting the Hyde plan, along with the city's experiment giving for-profit Education Alternatives Inc. control of other city schools.

"The roles for parents, teachers and students that are going to be needed will be revolutionary," Mr. Gauld says. "You're only going to change things by group force. But it's going to be war."