After five years running primarily on private donations, the Leadership Academy won a city contract last June for up to $10 million a year. Its centerpiece is the Aspiring Principals Program, a 14-month paid boot camp that has graduated 336 people since 2003, 227 of whom are now principals  15 percent of the total.

One Leadership Academy alumnus was removed from his post this month, pending Education Department investigations, after a public screaming match with the school’s parent coordinator; more than 250 parents had signed a letter citing a “litany of problems” including “increased staff turnover, parent dissatisfaction and general turmoil.” Another was removed upon his arrest in February for driving while intoxicated and fleeing the scene of an accident.

The first independent analysis of the academy’s effectiveness, done at New York University, is due in June. “I think our batting average is quite good,” Mr. Klein said. “Could it improve? I’m sure it could improve.”

Pulling Their Own Strings

Andrew M. L. Turay vividly remembers, back when he was principal of the Bronx’s mammoth Evander Childs High School in 2001, the day an assistant principal who had struggled at another school walked into his office and announced she would now be working with him: superintendent’s orders. “You were the figurehead as a principal, but the actual power was in the superintendent’s office,” he said. “They were pulling the strings.”

Now, as principal of Peace and Diversity Academy, a small high school in the Bronx that he founded in 2004, Mr. Turay not only picks his own staff but decides how to train them. Still cringing over the time he returned to Evander from a required daylong monthly session to find that a student had assaulted a staff member in the cafeteria, Mr. Turay can  and does  choose to skip virtually all meetings outside the office.

Where he oversaw more than 3,000 students at Evander, Mr. Turay now has 315, and makes it his business to know who was just absent for five days (the girl with multiple face piercings), and who is struggling with sexual identity (18 students are openly gay). There is no superintendent regularly visiting; it is up to Mr. Turay to call his network leader  his primary support person  on her cellphone when he needs help. Someone sent by the Education Department descends on the school for a few days at least once every three years and then submits a “quality review” on its shortcomings and successes, but Mr. Turay is judged, in large part, by a thick stack of documents.

Image EXPERIENCED Philip Weinberg, 49, has been at his Brooklyn high school since 1986 and principal since 2001. Credit... Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Compliance checklists, on items including vision-testing and fire drills. School report cards (he got a B). Parent and teacher surveys. A review of how well he has met his own goals.