A group whose mission is to deliver non-politicized statistics on the public schools is moving closer toward its goal after navigating a maze of organizational challenges.

The board of directors of the Research Alliance for New York City will this week interview two finalist candidates for the position of executive director.

The group is also hashing out agreements with a university that would house the project, and it has reached a tentative deal with the Department of Education to share data on students and schools conditional on a set of terms.

Alliance leaders said the progress is an impressive feat for an organization that must contend with steep challenges, such as balancing between several universities competing to host the project and finding a way to collaborate with the city without sacrificing independence.

“I think it’s unrealistic to expect all of this to have happened faster than it has,” an alliance board member and former president of Princeton University, William Bowen, said. “In fact, I’m kind of amazed that it has moved as rapidly as it has moved.”

The alliance has drawn a tentative budget of about $9 million over the next three years, to be paid for entirely through private foundation grants.

The tentative data-sharing deal with the Department of Education is counted as another accomplishment.

Right now, many education researchers say they find it difficult to cull information from the department. The director of the alliance project, a professor of education and sociology at New York University, Richard Arum, said the number of information requests the department receives is “in the thousands.”

The alliance would attempt to speed up the data-sharing process.

Under the tentative deal, the group would have a fixed set of data that would be kept constantly up-to-date. Some of that data, including figures such as schools’ state test scores, SAT results, and attendance data, would be widely available to the press and public. A larger set, including student-level information would be instantly available to a “Research Corps” selected by the executive director.

To ensure speedy responses to inquiries by the alliance, the Department of Education would also agree to appoint a person in charge of coordination, called a “senior data liaison.” The liaison would be paid for by the alliance but work under the supervision of the department, Mr. Arum said.

In addition to Mr. Bowen, who is a luminary in the field of education research, board members of the Research Alliance for New York City include Schools Chancellor Joel Klein; teachers union president Randi Weingarten; the CEO and president of the Partnership for New York City, a business group, Kathryn Wylde; and the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, Chung-Wha Hong.

Some researchers have raised concerns that having a board with such stakeholders will compromise the alliance’s research, but Mr. Arum and Mr. Bowen, the board’s founding chairman, said they are convinced the alliance will be able to operate independently.

“If I thought for one moment that either the Department of Education or anybody else were going to compromise the independence of this thing I would be off of this in an hour,” Mr. Bowen said.

Mr. Arum said the Department of Education and other stakeholders must be involved for the alliance to ensure access to information only school officials can provide.

In the data-sharing deal, the department would be provided an early notice and a chance to review research before it is published. Yet Mr. Arum said the deal explicitly makes it impossible for either the department or the board to quash research. “It’s very clear the governance board is not involved in approving the research prior to publication, nor is the district,” Mr. Arum said.

He said delays in getting the project off the ground were due to factors such as “competing political interests,” the difficulty of “getting people buying into this stuff,” and fund-raising.

Another delay came when the board rejected a first proposal for creating the alliance, delivered by two professors at NYU.

The alliance’s board of directors rejected the proposal in favor of asking not a university but an outside think tank that studies education, the Parthenon Group, to propose a business plan and organizational model.

“The university-generated proposal represents the university’s interest, but there’s other interests involved,” Mr. Arum said.

The Parthenon Group wrote its proposal last December with grants from foundations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

A search for an executive director began this spring.