It is astonishing to me how many times I've ended up weighing in on issues in the news and on the ground with the elite NEST+m public school on Manhattan's Lower East Side. It's just that the issues that come up there end up highlighting just how complicated some of this stuff can be.

I'll jump back in again, because the story over the weekend in the NY Times has a lot of people buzzing.

In some ways, when you cut out the drama and power plays that have taken place in PTA meetings, in the teachers' lounge, and in the administrative offices at the Tweed Courthouse, the tensions that we see with this case are interesting and probably even healthy.

You see a school that is working on the ground to build an independent school culture with high expectations, cutting whatever corners its leaders feel are appropriate in terms of getting the job done. Essentially, they will try (correctly, probably) to get away with whatever they can to make their school successful.

You see administrators at Tweed who profess to want to empower successful local schools to do their own thing, but who also understand their centralized role in maintaining a level playing field and an overarching set of ideals (and rules) under which its empowered, decentralized schools should be operating. (It is entirely appropriate for the guy who is ultimately in charge of public education in the city to be concerned about schools requiring interviews of incoming families, and the decisions behind who gets accepted and who gets rejected.)

It would seem that in order for decentralization to really work, some form of tension must play out here. School leaders SHOULD be pushing the envelope, bending the rules, putting the needs of their schools ahead of mandates from the centralized school structure.

But the central office also SHOULD keep a watchful eye - not just in terms of demanding and evaluating results, but in terms of monitoring whether the overarching rules of the city's public education system are in play.

That tension is good, and probably needs to happen if this is ultimately going to be about genuinely unleashing the tremendous potential of educators and parents at the school level.

But this is also complicated at times.

It is no secret that one of the conflicts that has driven much of what has happened at NEST was the school's decision to fight having to share space with a charter school that was slated to be housed there. Auditors wearing long, black coats don't just show up to demand a PTA's paperwork under the check-and-balance situation I outlined above. There's obviously a lot going on here.

But here is another reminder of how complicated this stuff can get: Over the weekend, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and Chancellor Joel Klein wrote about the city's need to offer single-sex schools among the menu of educational choices for the city's students. They cited the Young Women's Leadership School as a shining example of the good that can come for some students who choose to attend that kind of school setting.

The success of that particular all-girls school depended in large part on the courage of a school leader who was willing a decade ago to push forward even as critics slammed her for breaking the law by discriminating against boys. This principal pushed the school in directions that many people within the old Board of Education made clear they didn't actually want it to go. She bucked the rules and ignored some powerful people. Today you can see the fruits of those battles in the kinds of results that the chancellor and deputy mayor noted in their op-ed piece.

The groundbreaking founding principal at the Young Women's Leadership School, of course, was Celenia Chevere - the same principal who later pushed the envelope (some say too far) by creating NEST+m and who was bounced out of her job after the bloody battle with the Department of Education last spring.

The same educators that we honor for breaking the rules and pushing the envelope can also end up hanging themselves at times. This is not to say that any of this is right or wrong, just that is gets very tricky. (For my money, that is also what makes this so interesting.)