A new team of nationally known educators will try to help the city's high school teachers and principals get better at their jobs over the next five years -- and the Pittsburgh Public Schools is getting the advice for free.

High School Futures is a consulting group, formed during the summer, that is made up of several educators who have worked together for years. They decided to pool resources to help school districts improve, and Pittsburgh will be the group's first project.

"It's an exciting group of people," Pittsburgh Superintendent Mark Roosevelt said.

He described one member, Jonathon D. Saphier, founder of Massachusetts-based Research for Better Teaching Inc. and co-author of "The Skillful Teacher: Building Your Teaching Skills," as a "superstar" in the education field.

Another team member, Steven C. Leonard, has been credited with helping to turn around struggling Boston schools.

High School Futures will cover its initial costs in Pittsburgh with about $4.4 million in private grant money, though the district will have to pay its teachers and principals $975,000 through 2012-13 to attend extra training sessions.

The group chose Pittsburgh for its first project because of improvement efforts already under way here, said Dr. Saphier and Eva Ostrum, the group's founder.

Dr. Saphier said the goal isn't to supplant officials' current work but to "push what they've already done over the top."

Instead of restructuring troubled schools or recruiting fresh blood to turn them around, High School Futures will work to boost the effectiveness of current staff members. That means better instructional practices for teachers and better leadership strategies for principals, including how to involve faculty members in decision-making, Ms. Ostrum said.

The consultants have lofty goals -- a 10 percentage point annual gain in reading proficiency, math proficiency, graduation rate and college matriculation rate, beginning in the second year of the project at each high school.

"If you talk to other people in education, they may say it's a risky thing to do," Ms. Ostrum said of setting the bar at the level. Many districts would be pleased with 3 percent annual proficiency gains, she said.

But she said some of the educators involved in High School Futures have led their own schools to bigger, faster gains and believe they can show Pittsburgh and other clients how to do the same.

Each member of the consulting team brings different expertise to the project.

"Our specialty is the knowledge base on good teaching and learning and helping people get articulate around that with each other," Dr. Saphier said of Research for Better Teaching, based in Acton, Mass.

High School Futures will work with three to five city high schools a year. A leadership team of teachers and administrators from each school will undergo training, then be deployed to train others in their buildings.

Noting professional development sometimes is provided by outsiders unfamiliar with the district, Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers President John Tarka said he supported the proposal to involve teachers in the training of their peers and administrators.

"We don't want any teachers who are involved in this to simply be window dressing," he said. "We have no interest in that at all."

Ms. Ostrum is a former school administrator in Boston and Philadelphia who wrote "The Thinking Parent's Guide to College Admissions: The Step-by-Step Program to Get Kids Into the Schools of Their Dreams."

She took a principal's position at Springfield High School in Montgomery County in July 2007 but left about six months later, citing philosophical differences with the district administration, according to the Springfield Sun newspaper. Ms. Ostrum declined to elaborate last week, and the school district didn't return a call seeking comment.

Dr. Leonard is a 2002 graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy and assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction for the Taunton Public Schools in Massachusetts. Mr. Roosevelt is a 2003 graduate of the Broad program, designed to train urban educators for jobs in some of the nation's most troubled districts.

As a principal in Boston Public Schools, Dr. Leonard was credited with leading academic improvements at three troubled schools. During his long career, Dr. Leonard twice has been the subject of controversy.

In 1991, while principal of Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, he was suspended for five days after he helped a student submit an application that contained inaccurate residency information to the prestigious Boston Latin School. The student was not a Boston resident and therefore ineligible to attend the school, according to The Boston Globe.

In an interview last week, Dr. Leonard said he had believed the information in the student's application was correct and long ago accepted responsibility for the error.

In 2003, Dr. Leonard resigned as president of City on a Hill Charter Public School in Boston amid disagreements with others at the school and accusations of grade inflation. At the time, Mr. Roosevelt was a new member of the charter school board.

Dr. Leonard said last week that he did not believe grade inflation had occurred and instead had been trying to make the school more rigorous.

The charter school's former chairman, Harry Spence, last week said questions were raised about whether one of Dr. Leonard's subordinates pressured teachers in "two or three instances" into giving students better grades. Mr. Spence said the main reason for Dr. Leonard's departure was a forceful management style that wasn't well-received at the charter school.

Controversies aside, Mr. Roosevelt said, Dr. Leonard is a highly regarded administrator.

Other group members include Elizabeth A. City, director of instructional strategy at Harvard University's Executive Leadership Program for Educators, and Will Jordan, associate professor of urban education at Temple University.