Suzette Rose's class at Public School 284 is quick to react. In unison, the seventh graders in Brooklyn agree that "Fast Sam, Cool Clyde & Stuff" is a "good book."

"It shows how friends can help other friends with their problems," explains John, who sits at a group of desks near the front of the room.

"I found it interesting because it shows certain real-life situations," says Monet. "It's things that happen to us, like fights and stuff like that."

Similar discussions about "Fast Sam, Cool Clyde & Stuff" are taking place in seventh-grade classrooms across New York City - from the Bowery to the Bronx. And those classrooms now all look very much like Ms. Rose's. Their desks are clustered in small groups, a lending library sits on the windowsill, and a math lab is tucked in the back.

This is education reform, New York-style. In one of the most ambitious experiments in the nation, America's largest school system is being transformed in a matter of months in almost every way - from the textbooks and teaching techniques used in the classroom to the way desks are organized.

The defining characteristic: one central playbook. Almost all schools throughout the district now work with the same curriculum. They are governed by the same standards. Even the artwork hung on classroom walls is consistent: Bulletin boards are used to showcase students' work.

While few of the ideas being tried here are new, New York has packaged them more exactingly and applied them on a broader scale than perhaps any other American city.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in fact, is counting on the changes to turn the city into a national model for urban education - so much so, that he is hanging his political future, and in some ways the future of 1.1 million students, on their success.

Yet several months on, the radical makeover is yielding mixed results and opinions.

To educators like Cynthia Pond, the principal of PS 284, the reform is a much-needed "leveler." It is giving her school in the middle of the Brooklyn projects much of the same attention and resources as schools on the city's affluent Upper East Side - and the changes in the classroom are tangible.

But others see the push for more standardization as a straitjacket. The local teachers' union, in particular, believes the changes are preventing educators from doing what they do best - using their own initiative and creativity in the classroom.

"This administration doesn't ... even want to know what teachers think about what works for kids," said Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, at a recent rally outside City Hall.

The changes being implemented here represent a backlash to the more hands-off approach taken in the city's public schools in the 1970s. Back then, individual schools had more leeway to choose their own curriculum and pursue their own teaching methods.

But over the years test scores and education performance have fallen - though for many different reasons. Now Mr. Bloomberg and his education czar, Joel Klein, are trying to bring more consistency to one of the nation's most diverse and Balkanized districts.

While early opinion remains sharply divided over their vision and approach, virtually everyone agrees on one point: The speed and scope of the reforms are virtually unprecedented.

Messrs. Klein and Bloomberg have moved ambitiously - and controversially - to cut through seemingly intransigent layers of bureaucracy.

"I have never in my years seen such a substantial structural change in such a short period of time," says Mark Alter, chair of the department of teaching and learning at the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University.

PS 284 offers a telling look at how these changes are beginning to affect things in the classrooms of New York. Located in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the school is a 98-year-old granite monolith surrounded by towering brick projects - testaments to the government's vertical experiment in public housing in the postwar era.

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