Hartford - Persuading experienced Connecticut teachers to stay in troubled urban districts by letting them retire earlier than suburban teachers might help bolster graduation rates and narrow the state's achievement gap, an advisory group says in a report released Tuesday.

The Connecticut Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights also says the state should get parents more involved in decisions on how their children's schools are run.

Those are among several ideas the once-dormant advisory group, which the commission revived last year, proposed to Connecticut lawmakers and policymakers. The commission has advisory committees in each state and the District of Columbia, and each selects a civil rights issue they consider critical for their residents.

Connecticut group chairman Richard Wilson, director of the University of Connecticut's Human Rights Institute, said education was the obvious choice to study when considering Connecticut's gap between graduation rates.

Among Connecticut's class of 2009, the graduation rate was 86 percent for white students, versus 66 percent for black students and 58 percent for Hispanic students.

"Access to a high-quality education is still unequal," Wilson said.

Most of Connecticut's minority students are in urban districts, which struggle to retain experienced teachers who could make more money - and often have easier working conditions - in wealthier suburban districts or in other occupations.

One idea the advisory commission suggested is to allow teachers to retire with full benefits after 30 years instead of 37 years if they work at least 10 years in an underperforming city district.

Wilson said the group members did not know of other states with that kind of system, which would require legislative approval to change Connecticut's teacher pension and retirement rules.

Connecticut education officials say they share the group's concern about keeping experienced teachers in troubled districts, the motivation behind existing incentives like college loan forgiveness programs and low down-payment mortgages.

Some of the advisory group's ideas are similar to those in education reform plans Gov. M. Jodi Rell signed into law after the General Assembly adopted them last spring.

They include a plan for more parental involvement through mandated twice-yearly parent-teacher conferences, and creating governance councils consisting mostly of parents at low-achieving schools. Another idea - giving students a unique identifying number to track their progress and evaluate their teachers' effectiveness - is also already in the works.

"We don't have a lot to disagree with," state Department of Education spokesman Thomas Murphy said of the advisory group's report. "The question is, 'How do we get there?' and much of it would require legislation."

Messages were left Tuesday seeking comment from the Connecticut Education Association, the union representing about 41,000 state teachers.

Kenneth Wong, chairman of the education department at Brown University in Providence and director of its Urban Education Policy Program, said he wasn't aware of any states that offer earlier retirements by law to retain urban teachers.

But he questioned whether some teachers might remain in urban districts specifically for the perk when they otherwise might have left for the private sector and opened the teaching job for someone more enthusiastic.

He said other incentives to keep them could include more mentoring programs, offering them chances for specialized research or links with university professors, or other workplace improvements that make their jobs interesting and rewarding.

"One way to think about keeping some of these teachers in urban areas is to create a supportive work environment so they feel they are fully appreciated, and also to be able to have a sense of professional identity," Wong said. "You make it less likely for these people to leave that community once they develop that sense of belonging."