STEELERS 31, RAVENS 24

Steelers Beat Ravens to Advance to A.F.C. Title Game

Jason Cohn/Reuters

The Steelers’ Rashard Mendenhall ran in for the game-winning touchdown against the Ravens in the fourth quarter in Pittsburgh on Saturday.

By KAREN CROUSE

Published: January 15, 2011

• RECOMMEND
• TWITTER
• E-MAIL
• SEND TO PHONE
• PRINT
• REPRINTS
• SHARE

PITTSBURGH — It was the American Football Conference divisional rivalry that the microphones forgot, Saturday’s playoff game between the Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens barely moving the sound level needle in this week’s playoff discourse.

Related

• In Pittsburgh, a Quarterback Split (January 15, 2011)

The latest news, notes and analysis of the N.F.L. playoffs.

Go to The Fifth Down Blog

N.F.L.

• Live Scoreboard
• Standings
• Stats | Injuries

Giants

• Schedule/Results
• Stats | Roster
• Depth Chart

Jets

• Schedule/Results
• Stats | Roster
• Depth Chart

Enlarge This Image

Nick Laham/Getty Images

The Steelers’ Hines Ward caught a touchdown pass from Ben Roethlisberger in the third quarter to help tie the score, 21-21. The Steelers capitalized on three turnovers to erase a 21-7 deficit.

Enlarge This Image

Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

Steelers linebacker James Harrison sacking Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco.

Enlarge This Image

Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

Steelers tight end Heath Miller, above, diving for a pass in front of Ravens safety Dawan Landry.

The airwaves buzzed with the ramblings of Jets Coach Rex Ryanand the retorts from New England, home of the Jets’ A.F.C. East nemesis and Sunday opponent. The Jets and the Patriots do not have to talk because their brand of football is so loud and concussive. But talk they did, to the point where they seemed like the only show in theN.F.L.

What talking occurred between the Steelers and the Ravens in the lead-up to their A.F.C. North rubber match was relatively tame. In the case of Ravens linebacker Terrell Suggs, it was nonverbal: he met members of the news media one day this week wearing a T-shirt featuring an image of a raven making a vulgar gesture.

In the end, Troy Polamalu, who speaks softly and delivers a big hit, provided the words that proved prophetic, saying the game between the teams that have combined for threeSuper Bowl titles since 1999 would be more like a chess match than a trench war. It was going to be a battle of field position and turnovers, he predicted, adding that it was “the truest essence of what football is about.”

Short fields and costly mistakes told the story of the Steelers’ 31-24 victory at Heinz Field. Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, master of the Houdini drive, worked his magic again by marching the Steelers 65 yards in 11 plays for the winning score. Rashard Mendenhall ran the final yard for his second touchdown, with 1 minute 33 seconds left, as the Steelers earned a spot in the A.F.C. championship game against either the Jets or the Patriots.

Roethlisberger, who hasn’t lost to the Ravens since 2006, passed for 226 yards and 2 touchdowns. The Ravens’ Joe Flacco was 16 of 30 for the Ravens, who finished their season at 13-5. Flacco threw for 125 yards, with one touchdown and one interception.

The Ravens jumped out to a 21-7 lead in the first half, silencing the crowd of 64,879 by forcing two Pittsburgh turnovers they converted into 14 points.

The Steelers roared back in the second half by scoring 17 points off three Ravens turnovers to take a 24-21 lead. To the surprise of nobody, Baltimore came back to tie the score with 3:54 left in the fourth quarter on a 24-yard field goal by Billy Cundiff. The previous six games between the teams were decided by a total of 19 points.

For Roethlisberger, the game mirrored his season: it started on a low point and ended on a high one. He never looked more forlorn than late in the first quarter when, with the score tied at 7-7, Suggs knocked the ball from his grasp.

The football came to a rest at the Pittsburgh 13-yard line, where it sat for a few seconds before Ravens’ defensive end Cory Redding scooped it up and ambled into the end zone. The Steelers, who assumed the play was an incomplete pass, stood around, oblivious.

The score worked like a shot of anesthesia on the Steelers, who played the rest of the first half as if numbed. They turned the ball over again before the intermission, with Mendenhall fumbling at the Steelers’ 12. Mendenhall, who had given the Steelers the early lead with a one-yard run in the first quarter, lost the ball at the end of a four-yard gain.

After the recovery by the Ravens’ Ed Reed, Flacco led the Ravens on a six-play, 16-yard drive that culminated with a 4-yard touchdown pass to tight end Todd Heap.

In the Ravens’ 30-7 victory at Kansas City in an A.F.C. wild-card playoff game, Heap finished with 10 catches, five of which came, as did his 4-yard reception, on third down.

It got worse for the Steelers, whose kicker, Shaun Suisham, missed a 43-yard field-goal attempt with 26 seconds left in the second quarter. Suisham had made 14 of 15 field goals since being signed in November.

Flacco, in his third season, was trying to become the winningest road playoff quarterback in N.F.L. history, with a 5-2 record. After a fine first half, he was 30 minutes from wiping his psychic slate clean against the Steelers, who have handed him some of his worst memories as a pro.

In their game on Dec. 5, Flacco lost a fumble after being sacked by Polamalu, a play that allowed the Steelers to score the winning points on the ensuing drive. Two years ago in the A.F.C. title game, Flacco was intercepted by Polamalu, who returned the interception for a touchdown that punched the Steelers’ ticket to the Super Bowl.

The third quarter will haunt Flacco for a long time. After Ray Rice lost a fumble following a 5-yard catch, Flacco threw a deep pass intended for Heap that was intercepted by Ryan Clark. The Steelers capitalized with a 14-yard scoring pass from Roethlisberger to Hines Ward.

The 34-year-old Ward, one of eight Steelers starters older than 30, was coming off, for him, a sub-par season, with 59 catches and 5 touchdowns. He vowed this week to be someone his teammates could count on to make the clutch play in the postseason.

True to his word, after not making a catch in the first half, Ward brought the Steelers even with the Ravens at 21-21. Roethlisberger and the Steelers’ defense took it from there.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 16, 2011, on page SP1 of the National edition.

OBSERVATORY

Penguins Harmed by Tracking Bands, Study Finds

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

Benoit Gineste, CNRS / IPEV

King penguins with tags on their flippers had fewer chicks and a lower survival rate than penguins with microchips inserted under the skin.

OBSERVATORY

Four-Legged Investigators Sniff Out Wildlife Data

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

With more and more scientists using canines as assistants, an effort finds temperature and precipitation matter.

SCIENTIST AT WORK BLOG

Spider and Woolly Monkeys

By ANTHONY DI FIORE

Researchers watch a rare interspecies frolic among spider and woolly monkeys.

Agency Revokes Permit for Major Coal Mining Project

By JOHN M. BRODER

The Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday that the mountaintop-removal project would have done unacceptable damage.

Heavy-Lift Rocket Behind Schedule

By KENNETH CHANG

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration cannot develop a heavy-lift rocket by the end of 2016 within the budget provided, the space agency told Congress this week.

• Figures on Global Climate Show 2010 Tied 2005 as the Hottest Year on Record

• California: Company’s Study Says PCBs Did Not Harm Babies

• Texas: Court Allows E.P.A. to Issue Greenhouse Permits

• Tougher Rules Urged for Offshore Drilling

• Jack Oliver, Who Proved Continental Drift, Dies at 87

• Weather Monitoring Company Turns to Greenhouse Gases

• Florida: NASA Determines Cause of Cracks

Una mutación que aumenta la impulsividad

Una mutación que aumenta la impulsividad Un equipo de investigadores ha identificado un gen asociado a un alto nivel de impulsividad en el comportamiento, especialmente tras el consumo de alcohol. El descubrimiento arroja luz sobre las causas subyacentes a la impulsividad y podría desembocar en el desarrollo de métodos novedosos para el diagnóstico y tratamiento de trastornos caracterizados por una conducta impulsiva. El estudio, financiado parcialmente por la UE, se ha publicado en Nature. FUENTE | CORDIS: Servicio de Información en I+D Comunitario 16/01/2011

El comportamiento impulsivo, definido como el hecho de actuar sin prever o considerar las consecuencias, es un rasgo distintivo de numerosos trastornos, incluyendo la agresividad, la adicción, el trastorno de déficit de atención/hiperactividad (TDAH), el trastorno de personalidad antisocial y el suicidio. La tendencia hacia la impulsividad no siempre es negativa; cuando se requiere la toma rápida de decisiones o cuando el incumplimiento de plazos puede provocar la pérdida de oportunidades, puede ser una ventaja. En el estudio, científicos de Finlandia, Francia y Estados Unidos estudiaron a criminales finlandeses que habían cometido crímenes extremadamente violentos, de forma espontánea y sin motivo. "Realizamos este estudio en Finlandia debido a la genética médica e historia específicas de su población", explica el autor principal de la publicación, el doctor David Goldman del Instituto Nacional de Abuso del Alcohol y Alcoholismo (NIAAA), perteneciente a los Institutos nacionales de salud (NIH) de los Estados Unidos. "Los finlandeses actuales descienden de un número relativamente reducido de colonos, lo cual ha reducido la complejidad genética de las enfermedades en su país. El estudio de la genética de los autores de crímenes violentos en Finlandia aumentaba nuestras probabilidades de identificar genes que influyesen en el comportamiento impulsivo." El equipo comparó el ADN (ácido desoxirribonucleico) de 96 delincuentes violentos con el ADN del mismo número de finlandeses sanos no impulsivos. El análisis reveló que los delincuentes tenían tres veces más probabilidades que los sujetos de control de presentar una mutación en un gen llamado HTR2B, un gen receptor de la serotonina en el cerebro. La serotonina es una molécula que participa en diversos comportamientos, incluida la impulsividad. Sin embargo, los investigadores señalan que la mutación por sí sola no es suficiente para provocar que un individuo cometa actos impulsivos; el alcohol también es un elemento clave de la ecuación. "Los portadores de la variante del HTR2B que habían cometido delitos impulsivos eran hombres y todos ellos se volvieron violentos únicamente tras embriagarse, lo cual ya por sí solo produce desinhibición en el comportamiento", comenta el doctor Goldman. Los diecisiete delincuentes violentos que portaban la mutación habían cometido una media de cinco delitos violentos, tales como homicidio, intento de asesinato, incendio provocado, agresión y ataque. Alrededor del 94 % de dichos delitos se cometieron mientras el autor estaba ebrio y la mayoría fueron reacciones desproporcionadas a pequeñas contrariedades. Los delitos no fueron premeditados y los autores no obtuvieron ningún beneficio económico con sus actos. Algunos miembros de las familias de los delincuentes también portan el gen y sufren trastornos psiquiátricos, por ejemplo de personalidad antisocial. La mutación que se acaba de descubrir parece ser exclusiva a la población finlandesa. No obstante, la importancia de las conclusiones del estudio es más amplia, puesto que pueden conducir al desarrollo de nuevos tratamientos para trastornos que impliquen una conducta impulsiva. Cabe destacar que los investigadores advierten de que la impulsividad es una cuestión compleja que abarca numerosos factores genéticos y ambientales. Para profundizar en el estudio del gen, el equipo estudió a ratones a los que se había bloqueado el gen HTR2B. Estos animales resultaron ser extremadamente impulsivos y el equipo está investigando actualmente la relación entre el consumo de alcohol y el gen. "El descubrimiento de una variante genética que predice un comportamiento impulsivo en determinadas condiciones en una población humana puede tener implicaciones mucho más amplias," afirma el Director en funciones del NIAAA Kennet Warren, que no participó en la investigación. "La relación con la intoxicación por alcohol resulta interesante, dado que en las adicciones y otros comportamientos se considera importante la supuesta implicación de una ruta de los neurotransmisores."

Música placentera como la comida o la droga

Música placentera como la comida o la droga Canciones imprescindibles. Canciones que nos aceleran el pulso y la respiración. Canciones que nos ponen la piel de gallina y que desencadenan en el cerebro una cascada de reacciones mediadas por la dopamina en el sistema de recompensa. Un estudio revela que la música puede ser tan placentera como la droga. FUENTE | El Mundo Digital 16/01/2011

Las personas experimentamos un intenso placer frente a estímulos que son necesarios para sobrevivir (comida), a las llamadas recompensas secundarias (dinero) y a las sustancias que promueven esas reacciones químicas (drogas). Pero también tenemos la capacidad de obtener placer a través de estímulos abstractos como la música o el arte. "La mayor parte de la gente coincide en que la música es un estímulo placentero especialmente potente que se usa con frecuencia para influir en los estados emocionales", explican los autores del trabajo en las páginas de 'Nature Neuroscience'. Su capacidad para provocar reacciones fisiológicas está perfectamente documentada. Es lo que se llama 'escalofrío emocional', una respuesta mediada por el sistema nervioso autónomo que afecta a la frecuencia cardiaca, respiratoria, a la conductividad de la piel y a la temperatura periférica. Aunque también se ha observado que las áreas del cerebro que conforman los circuitos de la emoción y la recompensa se activan mientras que escuchamos los compases que consideramos placenteros, el papel directo de la dopamina no se ha comprobado. Este neurotransmisor es el mediador de las adicciones a drogas como la cocaína o la heroína. Gracias a la investigación realizada en el Instituto Neurológico de Montreal de la Universidad McGill(Canadá), ahora sabemos que la dopamina también media el placer que experimentamos con la música, "una recompensa muy abstracta que consiste en una secuencia de tonos desplegados a través del tiempo que produce una respuesta comparable a la de estímulos más básicos", indican los autores. Y no sólo durante los momentos especialmente estimulantes de una melodía. El cerebro también reaccionaba (y liberaba dopamina) justo antes, un fenómeno llamado anticipación. En resumen, "estos resultados ayudan a explicar por qué la música está tan valorada en todas las sociedades", concluye el estudio. Autor:   Cristina de Martos

La posibilidad de que las catástrofes cromosómicas provoquen cáncer

La posibilidad de que las catástrofes cromosómicas provoquen cáncer Un equipo de científicos ha descubierto indicios de que las células humanas pueden sufrir cientos de mutaciones en una única catástrofe cromosómica que podría provocar el rápido desarrollo de cáncer. Los hallazgos, publicados en la revista Cell, contradicen la creencia de que el proceso de desarrollo del cáncer es indefectiblemente lento y que consiste en la acumulación gradual de mutaciones dañinas durante un periodo de tiempo. FUENTE | CORDIS: Servicio de Información en I+D Comunitario 16/01/2011

Los científicos, procedentes del Reino Unido y los Estados Unidos, han bautizado el fenómeno descrito como «cromotripsis», que consta de los vocablos griegos «chromos» (de cromosoma) y «thripsis» (ruptura en fragmentos). Es cierto que la mayoría de los cánceres se desarrollan lentamente y que pueden transcurrir años o incluso décadas hasta que un tumor acumula mutaciones suficientes para evolucionar desde la etapa precancerosa hasta la malignidad. No obstante, en algunos casos el cáncer parece surgir de la nada. En el estudio referido, los investigadores analizaron los genomas de varias muestras de cáncer. La mayoría de las muestras se correspondían con el patrón habitual de desarrollo del cáncer, es decir, una acumulación gradual de mutaciones. En cambio, en un número reducido de las muestras se observó que se había producido un único cataclismo que, de golpe, había provocado decenas o incluso cientos de mutaciones. «Los resultados nos sorprendieron», comentó el primer firmante del artículo, el Dr. Peter Campbell delWellcome Trust Sanger Institute del Reino Unido. «Puede decirse que, al parecer, uno o más cromosomas de una misma célula habían explotado de una sola vez y dado lugar literalmente a cientos de fragmentos.» En condiciones normales, ninguna célula podría sobrevivir a una destrucción de esta naturaleza. Sin embargo, en algunos casos la maquinaria del ácido desoxirribonucleico (ADN) trata de reparar los daños. «Lo normal sería que la célula se diera por vencida, pero en lugar de eso trata de volver a encajar los cromosomas como si se tratase de una valiosa pieza de porcelana», explicó el Dr. Campbell. Las consecuencias de este intento de reparación son frecuentemente desastrosas, puesto que el genoma resultante queda plagado de un gran número de mutaciones que pueden acelerar el proceso de desarrollo de cáncer en la célula. Los autores llegaron a observar 239 recomposiciones en un mismo cromosoma de una muestra de cáncer colorrectal. En su opinión, cerca del 2 o el 3% del total de los genomas cancerosos responden al perfil del fenómeno de la cromotripsis. Éste parece ser especialmente común en los cánceres de hueso, concretamente en el 25% de estos casos. En una muestra de cáncer de hueso se observó que, como consecuencia de un único fenómeno, se habían producido mutaciones en tres genes del cáncer. El patrón de los daños sufridos sugiere que la cromotripsis se produce durante la división celular, momento en el que los cromosomas son mucho más compactos de lo habitual. Se sospecha que la causa puede ser la radiación ionizante. «Un pulso de radiación ionizante, que como es bien sabido puede provocar rupturas en el dsDNA [ADN bicatenario], es capaz de abrirse camino a través de un cromosoma condensado y [...] generar rupturas que afecten a una franja, un brazo o la totalidad del cromosoma», explican los autores. A continuación el equipo se propone estudiar el cáncer en personas con antecedentes de exposición a radiación ionizante para dar con ejemplos de cromotripsis. «Si logramos comprender su origen, quizás podamos aprender a prevenir esa clase de daños», apuntó el Dr. Campbell. Otra posibilidad es que los daños se produzcan durante el proceso de desgaste de los telómeros, un proceso natural de acortamiento de las puntas de los cromosomas. Según indican los investigadores, la mayor parte del daño provocado por cromotripsis observado en el estudio afectaba a regiones cromosómicas que se extendían hasta los telómeros. «Sea cual sea el mecanismo de daño, las consecuencias son profundas», concluyen los investigadores. «Al encontrarse ante cientos de rupturas del ADN, la maquinaria de reparación del ADN de la célula trata de rescatar el genoma. El batiburrillo resultante se parece bien poco a la estructura original, y la alteración genómica correspondiente tiene consecuencias amplias y potencialmente oncogénicas.»

Anatomy of a School Crisis

Angel Valentin for The New York Times; David Goldman for The New York Times

José Maldonado-Rivera, the founding principal of Columbia Secondary school, and a newspaper clipping showing Nicole Suriel, 12-year-old student drowned on a day trip to a Long Island beach.

By AMY VIRSHUP

Published: January 14, 2011

• RECOMMEND
• TWITTER
• E-MAIL
• SEND TO PHONE
• PRINT
• SINGLE PAGE
• REPRINTS
• SHARE

THE auditorium at Columbia Secondary School was packed one evening last month. In the balcony, students held placards calling for the return of Dr. M — the founding principal, José Maldonado-Rivera, who had been dismissed the day before. Below, parents spilled over into standing room. One rose to speak in favor of the dismissal, only to be shouted down. Another rebuked the acting principal for reading from notes.

Related

• Girl, 12, Drowns at Beach on Class Trip to Long Island (June 23, 2010)

Enlarge This Image

David Goldman for The New York Times

In June, Lucille Camp and her daughter Phoenix, 9, visited a memorial at Columbia Secondary for Nicole Suriel, 12, who drowned on a field trip to a Long Island beach.

At a school where close to half of the students come from Spanish-speaking homes, the fact that there was no designated translator fanned the flames. As the administrators spoke in English, the crowd grew increasingly restive. Finally, a woman stood and delivered a rapid-fire tirade in Spanish. “She’s not very happy about the situation,” translated Roxana Bosch, the school’s associate director of admissions and parent relations. The shorthand would have been laughable, if emotions had not been running so high.

Dr. Maldonado-Rivera, the charismatic and controversial head of Columbia, a four-year-old selective school in Harlem, had weathered an investigation last summer into the drowning of a sixth grader on a field trip to a Long Island beach. Now, just as the school seemed to be regaining its footing after that tragedy, its leader had been dismissed for having what city officials called “an inappropriate financial relationship” with the school’s former parent coordinator, Monica Marin-Reyes. Ms. Marin-Reyes had baby-sat for Dr. Maldonado-Rivera’s son without charging, and later lived, rent-free, in his apartment; that they are now in a romantic relationship added spice to the reports splashed across the news media.

The school was a high-profile startup with backing from Columbia University. Its students performed well on state tests, and its teachers earned accolades from education watchdogs. Its mission was to wed two of the highest aspirations of the public school system — excellence and equality of opportunity — in a combined middle school and high school devoted to science, math and engineering, where the children of new immigrants living in Washington Heights would share classrooms with the children of university professors. The school was supposed to be “part of this brand-new world,” as one parent put it. How had it become engulfed by tumult instead?

Conversations with more than two dozen parents, current and former teachers and students, as well as with Dr. Maldonado-Rivera, Ms. Marin-Reyes and Andrew Stillman, the assistant principal at the time of the drowning, show that there were always fissures underlying the strong statistics at Columbia. The episode exposed them, and acted like a kaleidoscope that — depending on how it was turned — revealed radically different perspectives. Turn it one way, and the principal was a visionary brought low by Department of Education bureaucrats; turn it another, and he was a dangerous autocrat whose disdain for the rules finally caught up with him.

Throughout its history, the school had faced financial challenges — partly because Dr. Maldonado-Rivera, who had never taught in a New York City public school, never mind run one, was caught off guard by a drop in city funding; and partly because of its ambitious program, including a rich range of experiential learning adventures each June.

Open houses for potential students have been packed, and each year the school gets hundreds more applications than it has seats. But annual teacher turnover has run as high as 40 percent, and on a 2009-10 Department of Education survey, 70 percent of the teachers responding disagreed with the statements “The principal is an effective manager who makes the school run smoothly” and “I trust the principal at his or her word.”

The School Leadership Team, a group of parents and faculty that is supposed to help shape Columbia’s development, grew increasingly divided, participants said: differing over discipline, supervision and, ultimately, over the very idea of whether students from vastly different backgrounds could succeed in the same accelerated curriculum.

“José has a very spontaneous leadership style,” was how Mr. Stillman, now a teacher at the school, put it. “He didn’t manage the school like a bureaucrat.”

“He’s a Svengali,” said Ruth Margeson, whose son is an eighth grader. “He can weave a web, and you can get stuck in it.”

IN the beginning, parents remember, Dr. Maldonado-Rivera issued a simple yet profound invitation: “Come build a school with me.”

Columbia Secondary started with the bold goal of drawing a student body that mirrored the racially diverse population of Upper Manhattan, while maintaining a selectivity and curriculum that would challenge the best schools in the city. Most of New York’s elite public schools enroll few black and Hispanic students (5 percent at Stuyvesant High School, 11 percent at Bronx Science), and there are also high-performing schools likeFrederick Douglass Academy in Harlem where fewer than 1 percent of the students are white.

At the middle-school level, Columbia is open to children who live or attended elementary school north of 96th Street. To get in, students must get a 3 or a 4 (out of a possible 4) on the state’s English Language Arts and math exams in fourth grade, and then compete on an essay test. Black and Hispanic families of Harlem and Washington Heights felt as if the school was opening a door that had long been shut. The mostly white and middle-class families of the Upper West Side found the marriage of racially mixed classes and high expectations appealing.

Enlarge This Image

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Andrew Stillman, the assistant principal then and a teacher now, said critics of the principal exploited the tragedy.

Related

• Girl, 12, Drowns at Beach on Class Trip to Long Island (June 23, 2010)

Enlarge This Image

Susan Farley for The New York Times

Chance Nalley, a math teacher, left the school in the summer.

From the beginning, Dr. Maldonado-Rivera, a passionate educator with a Ph.D. in science education who had most recently been working in private schools in Puerto Rico, had grand plans: Before classes even began, he told parents he was writing a book about the school. One recalled thinking, “If José can deliver on 60 or 70 percent of what he says he’ll do, it will be a good experience.” The principal read every entrance exam, called each of the families whose children had been accepted the first year and freely handed out his cellphone number.

Opening in 2006 with 96 sixth graders, in part of an old school building, Columbia was intimate and exciting. At potluck dinners, families mingled. In engineering class, children built catapults and had a marshmallow-shooting contest. Among the electives were things like outdoor survival skills — the school got a permit to start a fire in the snow in nearby Morningside Park.

If it seemed that they were making things up on the fly, that was all right. “We all knew that when we signed up,” said Christine Stute, whose son was part of that first class. “And I think the group of people that decided to sign up was a special kind of group because they were willing to take these risks.”

The capstone to the year was the June J-Term, when students would fan out on field assignments, studying a single subject in depth. Dr. Maldonado-Rivera took about two dozen to Puerto Rico, a trip that Malaga Baldi, who went along with her daughter, remembers as “outrageous, fantastic.” They camped in a rain forest, visited a banana plantation, went snorkeling, and sloshed through swamps; the children would be up until 10 p.m. working on PowerPoint presentations or journal entries.

The next year, Ms. Baldi chaperoned another J-Term journey, where students studied science at the University of Maine’s Orono campus, then hiked and biked in Acadia National Park. “There was one boy who’d never ridden a bike before, and Chance taught him how to bike in three hours,” Ms. Baldi said of Chance Nalley, a teacher who led the trip. “It still brings tears to my eyes. I felt so privileged to be there. It was spiritual and really, really wonderful.”

ALONG with its name, Columbia University gives the school $100,000 a year, a quarter of it to buttress the principal’s salary, the rest to pay people to teach electives, among other things. Most of the rest of the school’s budget comes from the Department of Education — and with it, the thicket of rules known as the Chancellor’s Regulations, which Dr. Maldonado-Rivera quickly found burdensome. In the private school world, he said, “I had equipped an entire middle school in one week with a credit card.” Now, even ordering tables and chairs “took weeks and we had to argue with people less competent than us, people who’d never run a school.”

“I can’t spend 10 hours ordering a chair,” he said. “I’m not built for that.”

Columbia added a grade each year, which meant hiring a new crop of teachers and developing new curriculum. And each year the school took over a little more space in the West 123rd Street building it shared with another school (a site the university had promised on its new Manhattanville campus kept receding into the future). It was an enormous, exhausting undertaking; many staff members, from Dr. Maldonado-Rivera down, worked 12-hour days and frequent Saturdays.

Plans would be made and then changed; an example involved education in Spanish. The school pledges to produce bilingual students, but instruction has veered from one approach to another. First, Spanish classes taught native speakers and nonspeakers together. When that proved unwieldy, only native speakers got Spanish instruction. Then the nonspeakers started using Rosetta Stone language programs on computers, while the native speakers had a teacher. Now, all students again have a teacher, with different level classes.

One of the reasons for such changes in direction was money. In its first year, Columbia got about $10,000 per pupil from the city, the systemwide average. The next fall, it received about $6,300, because its students did not qualify for certain money earmarked for low performers. Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said the cut took him by surprise, and that he had to drop one of the two Spanish teachers he had planned to hire.

But to some people, the shifting approaches felt like chaos. “There was a general administrative disorder that characterized the school,” said one parent who worked closely with the administration and, like many of those interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of adversely affecting his child’s education.

This parent told a story encapsulating all he felt was good — and bad — about the principal’s management style. Dr. Maldonado-Rivera did not think highly of the city’s substitute teachers, so when a teacher was absent, a colleague filled in — sometimes Dr. Maldonado-Rivera himself. In one science class, he led a lesson on the atom.

“Gathering six children in the center of the room he said: ‘O.K., you’re the nucleus. Stand in the middle, and hug each other tightly,’ ” the parent explained. “And then to another group he said: ‘You, you’re electrons. Run around randomly. And you, you’re the charge, so jump to the outside.’ It was a tremendous lesson.”

But in the front office, the parent said, “all kinds of things weren’t getting done.”

Relationships between teachers and administrators were increasingly strained.

“His philosophy was just go, just do it,” said Dana Ligocki, a social studies teacher who quit in the middle of last school year. “It doesn’t matter if we’re doing things well, but it matters if we do a lot of things. I started to see that that was his way of being a leader. And then safety gets cut or curriculum gets cut.”

Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said that some teachers left for personal reasons, and that others could not live up to his high expectations.

“It’s a very ambitious school with a high intellectual demand,” he said. “We don’t need to apologize for having high standards for teachers. I’d ask myself, ‘Would I want my son to be learning science or math with this teacher?’ And if it’s not something I would want, then that’s something I would need to fix.”

COLUMBIA parents were supposed to be partners in their children’s education, and the school’s diversity was a big draw. But those active in the School Leadership Team and the parent association  tended to be disproportionately white and professional.

“In terms of actually doing the everyday work, the numbers of Hispanics is very limited, ” said Victor Acosta, one of the active Hispanic parents, whose daughter, a ninth grader now, was in the founding class. “There’s no tradition of volunteering in the schools in the first generation. You send your kids to school and the school takes care of it.”

By the school’s third year, meetings — and follow-up e-mails — had become increasingly contentious, participants said. (Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said that it was “not a functional entity.”) Some questioned whether the electives taught by college students or parents were appropriately supervised. Some protested discipline procedures — children were sometimes asked to apologize before the whole school for misbehavior, a process one parent likened to “public shaming,” and Dr. Maldonado-Rivera once held the whole seventh grade after school for 40 minutes because some children had been acting up in the hallways. Parents and teachers pushed for a guidance counselor; Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said the school did not need — and could not afford — one.

Perhaps the biggest debate came over academics. Some students scored as high as 90 on the entrance exam, but the mean was a 28. Once in, all faced the same accelerated curriculum. Some soared; others sank. At one point last school year, a third of the seventh grade was on academic probation.

Struggling students were tutored after school, pulled out of electives, kept behind in the classroom during J-Term. Some were counseled out — Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said there was 8 to 10 percent attrition for academic reasons each year. “Sometimes,” Mr. Stillman said, “you end up cutting your losses.”

Some parents and teachers proposed establishing different levels of classes to accommodate the achievement range. But Dr. Maldonado-Rivera refused to compromise his vision of a school where all children learned together at the highest levels. “If part of your philosophy is a commitment to strength in diversity,” he said, “then you have a commitment to not tracking.”

Critics complained that the principals’ vision blinded him to reality and that he was more interested in branding the school as “world class” than dealing with its problems. “It wasn’t working, but he didn’t see it as needing to be fixed,” said Ms. Margeson, the parent with a boy in eighth grade.

At an established school, many of those debates would have been over. But Columbia’s culture was up for grabs. Who would define it? Who made the rules?

THEN, on June 22, 12-year-old Nicole Suriel drowned in a riptide in Long Beach.

A city investigation found that no regulations were broken on the beach that day, though it did fault Columbia for not having proper permission slips for the trip and suggested that the school could have done better. “There was a lack of adequate planning by the principal and assistant principal,” the report said, “a failure to provide a sufficient number of adults to supervise the children at the beach, and poor judgment by the teacher in charge, who either failed to realize that there were no lifeguards on duty or failed to recognize the additional danger presented by their absence.”

The teacher who had been the main chaperone was fired, and Mr. Stillman stepped down as assistant principal. Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said he had offered to resign if it would save their jobs, and then was put on probation. He was adamant that his decisions had not contributed to the drowning. “The systems of risk management that we had in place were way beyond anything that the D.O.E. required,” he said.

But — in a turn of the kaleidoscope — a significant number of others at the school saw things differently. A faculty group led by Mr. Nalley, the teacher who had helped a student learn to ride a bike, went to the union arguing that the drowning had been “part of a pattern of negligence at the school,” said a member of the group, Ms. Ligocki, the social studies teacher. When the investigator’s report did not go that far, Mr. Nalley, the union representative at Columbia, protested the findings publicly and then told city officials about the principal’s relationship with Ms. Marin-Reyes.

A group of the principal’s supporters also went to education officials, to deny any improprieties between Dr. Maldonado-Rivera and Ms. Marin-Reyes, which, in an odd twist, ended up spurring the investigation.

Mr. Nalley declined to be interviewed. Instead, he e-mailed an excerpt from a report on the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster: “Hubris refers to an exaggerated pride or self-confidence that turns into arrogance. It results from excessive admiration of oneself, a series of previous successes, uncritical acceptance of accolades and a belief that one is exempt from the rules. In the end, hubris is eventually rewarded with disaster and comeuppance.”

Mr. Stillman said Dr. Maldonado-Rivera’s critics exploited the tragedy. In a moment of great emotional turmoil, “each person read into the situation their private critiques of José,” he said.

“It became part of the institutional politics to correlate the drowning with a pattern of risk-taking.”

As September drew nearer, the principal raced to hire new teachers — seven, or about half the faculty, including Mr. Nalley, had departed by midsummer. Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said his intention had been “to save the school, rebuild the boat and go back out.”

ON Nov. 30, Dr. Maldonado-Rivera was in a meeting when someone from the superintendent’s office handed him a letter saying he was fired. It seemed “surreal,” he said, not least because he had been assured that he would get off with “a hit on the chin.”

Dr. Maldonado said a call he made to the chancellor’s cellphone went unreturned. The students were eating lunch, and Dr. Maldonado-Rivera had them moved to the gym.

“I wanted to speak to my children,” he said. “I wanted to explain to them what was going on.”

But the superintendent warned him not to, the principal said, “or I would be removed by a police officer.”

Instead, the students were given the news in small groups; some teachers just handed them each letters announcing the firing.

“Some students started to cry,” said Kiambra Griffin, a ninth grader, who quickly created aFacebook page — Bring Back Dr. José Maldonado-Rivera to Columbia Secondary School — though she had the feeling that it would be futile.

Natalie Ravitz, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said in an e-mail that officials had considered “the full history and scope” of the principal’s conduct and found “repeated, serious failures in judgment and violations of our regulations.” She added: “As much as we understand that this is emotional for the Columbia Secondary community, we cannot turn a blind eye to his record.”

Neither Dr. Maldonado-Rivera nor Ms. Marin-Reyes denied the facts in the report, except to say that their relationship did not become romantic until the summer. “I thought for a conflict of interest money had to be exchanged,” Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said.

A week after the firing, there was another parents’ meeting, this time drawing about 50 people. Things proceeded calmly as the interim acting principal, Gary Biester, a longtime math teacher and administrator, spoke with a translator by his side.

Damaris Solis Padilla, whose daughter is in the ninth grade, said that she thought Dr. Maldonado-Rivera’s firing had been unfair, but that she was ready to move on. “We’ve got to have a school that still can run and thrive and be all the good things it’s supposed to be, despite this one person leaving,” she said. “When the leader leaves, the families are really important, because we’re the ones that stay.”

«

A version of this article appeared in print on January 16, 2011, on page CT1 of the New York edition

.