A report released yesterday calling for $2.5 billion to be spent on creating “laboratory schools” in public classrooms across the city is raising eyebrows among education analysts.

Crafted by a commission appointed by the speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, the report looks at how New York should spend billions of education dollars a court has ordered Albany to provide to the city.

“You’re testing teaching methods on children who need to graduate and go to college. The first thing I would want to know as a parent is, are my kids going to be used as an experiment?” the vice chairman of the Educational Leadership, Administration, and Policy division at Fordham University, Matt Bromme, said. “There are 1,200 schools in New York City that would like to see that money used for capital construction, repairing buildings, and reducing class size.”

In a press conference at City Hall yesterday, the director of the commission, Anthony Alvarado, a former schools chancellor, stressed the importance of testing teaching methods before they hit schools citywide.

Graduation rates have improved only slightly over the past 20 years, rising to 47% from 42%,the report said. He rolled out a 20-year timeline to demonstrate how the city has continually tried and failed to implement successful changes to the education system.

The 156-page report calls for creating a lab district made up of lab schools scattered throughout the city. The schools would function as regular public schools with researchers, principals, and teachers working together to track the effectiveness of programs to improve reading and math skills.

“Right now, we don’t know why scores go up and down….All we know is that we have data at the end of the year,” Mr. Alvarado told The New York Sun. He said that city schools would not get better and students would not succeed until the Department of Education took a step back and tested its initiatives before putting them into practice.

Of the $2.5 billion, about $170 million would be used to run the lab schools and the rest would be put toward bringing the successful initiatives into classrooms citywide. The commission’s 12-member panel includes professors, advocates for children, and a City Council member, Robert Jackson.

Sol Stern, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said he found the lab school idea “laughable.”

“There’s at least three decades of very solid scientific research on what’s the best way to teach children to read and what’s the best way to teach children to be proficient in math. We don’t need more lab schools,” he said.

In a phone interview, Mr. Alvarado challenged Mr. Stern to provide “the science he believes exists that has been proven to be effective for low-income, low-performing urban youth.”

The report also calls for drastically increasing funding for pre-kindergarten classes and raising salaries for principals.

For now, however, the city is waiting for the money, which is tied up in a 12-year battle that has now moved to the appellate division in Manhattan. Governor Pataki is appealing a court decision that would bring an additional $5.6 billion a year into city schools, as well as another $9.2 billion over five years for capital costs.

Even if the city gets the extra funding, it may not be spent according to the panel’s report. Mayor Bloomberg, for example, has also put forward a plan for how to use the money.