Laws, regulations, case law, and contracts are paralyzing New York City’s educators, according to a new interactive analysis describing what teachers and principals must do to accomplish seemingly simple tasks.

Common Good, the New York-based legal-reform group that created a Web site to report its findings, discovered more than 60 sources of rules that govern what goes on at the classrooms, hallways, and offices of the city’s 1,356 schools.

The regulations include 720 pages of rules issued by the state’s education commissioner, as well as the 204-page New York City teachers contract, the 690-page No Child Left Behind Act, and mountains of other local, state, and federal regulations.

“Schools end up focusing precious resources on trying to comply with the law and figure out what the law is, rather than educating children,” Common Good’s director of policy and general counsel, Nancy Udell, said.

“At some level we have to go back and assess what we have done here,” she said. “Have we regulated and litigated schools to the point where people just can’t accomplish their jobs?”

The report, which is available at http://cgood.org/burden-of-law.html, has two sections.

First, it displays six stacks of books, each containing links to different sets of rules governing the schools.

A click on the book representing “New York State Education Law” leads to the following description of the law: “The law fills more than 850 small print pages and governs everything from building plans to curriculum to teacher certification to the use of pesticides and automated external defibrillators in the schools.”

The site lists a few safety regulations from the state law, including the regulation that mandates the specific types of mercury-vapor or metal-halide lamps that may be used in schools, and a rule that requires students to wear safety goggles when they’re near hot solids or liquids. The law also requires that schools provide “appropriate and conspicuous notice” around electronically operated doors (more regulations on electronic doors can be found in the chancellor’s regulations, the site notes).

It also lists the major topics, starting with the letter “A,” that appear in the state law. They include Acupuncture, Alternate Schooling, Architecture, and Audiology. Interested parties can click a link to find out the topics between letters “B” and “Z.”

Clicks on other books displayed on the study’s home page yield similarly detailed results.

The Web site’s other key feature is a “How do I?” section, which describes the intricate procedures required of principals who want to complete such tasks as firing inept teachers, suspending disruptive students, and replacing broken heating systems.

The heating system how-to guide starts with what seems like a commonsense proposition: keeping cold students and teachers warm. But after explaining that the new system must abide by the commissioner’s regulations and the New York City health code, the flow chart informs would-be fixer-upper principals that they have “no authority” to just hire someone to fix the system, because state law grants them the authority only to “arrange for minor repairs as delegated by the chancellor.”

After a long flow of interlocking circles, ovals, squares, arrows, squiggles, and parallelograms, the chart ends up at an ominously small rectangle instructing principals to see the city’s five-year capital plan.

The city’s Department of Education, which routinely complains that the teachers contract contains too many rules that take away from the important work of teaching and learning, applauded the report.

“This study is on the mark,” a department spokeswoman, Michele Mc-Manus, said. “We need a system that puts the interest of children first, one that is built on a shared vision of high quality schools for all of our children, and where everyone involved acts based on mutual respect and a commitment to success that is measured by student performance.”

She continued: “Years of experience have demonstrated that we will not be able to regulate ourselves into success through micro-compliance or through micromanagement by either the bureaucracy or unduly proscriptive labor agreements.”

The chairwoman of the City Council’s Committee on Education, Eva Moskowitz, called the report “terrific.”

“Experience has taught me that there are just an incredible number of rules and regulations that don’t necessarily enhance education for kids and at times impede it in a rather dramatic way,” she said. “Having to go through this incredible number of steps means it takes longer, costs more, and there’s a divided responsibility so the task is done more poorly.”

Ms. Moskowitz said the rules not only make it harder for principals and teachers to do their jobs. They also deter educators from doing such things as suspending disruptive students and firing problem teachers.

“Clearly, I would not suggest that you do not need any policies in place. The question is the quantity and how logical they are,” the council member said. “A rug-cleaning policy which is two pages long is ridiculous. You don’t need a policy. You don’t need a set of regulations. You need the rugs to be cleaned.”

She said an easy solution would be injecting trust into the system.

“You need people with good judgment and talent, and you need to trust that when you have good people they will make good judgments,” Ms. Moskowitz said. “If they don’t, then you need to discontinue them, not build mountains of rules and regulations.”

The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, expressed similar sentiments.

“I complain just as much about the bureaucracy and the micromanagement as everyone else does,” she said.

For example, she said, because of the chancellor’s new policy of stopping the “social promotion” of third- and fifth graders, teachers are being forced to handwrite three binders for each child. She said by the end of the year, the binders would be about four inches thick.

“There is this culture of punitive micromanagement imposed from on high from chancellors and commissioners and departments of education onto schools, and both principals and teachers are suffering under the yoke of the bureaucracy,” Ms. Weingarten said. “The contract is the only thing that says to people: Stop. Let us have a voice.”

The president of the principals’ union, Jill Levy, on the other hand, said the report “misstated the problem.”

“I would rather have a system of laws that protect people against random and personal behaviors than have a lawless system,” she said. “Many of these laws and decisions were created to protect people and provide workers with their due process rights. Our principals have similar rights.”

Ms. Udell of Common Good said the goal of the Web site was not to show principals and teachers how to navigate the system. Rather, she said, it is meant to convince school-system leaders that they need to take a look at how the law and public schools fit together.

Ms. Udell suggested a sort of legal “spring cleaning” to streamline school decision-making.

“What’s really needed is a model for a school where educators can use their judgment to educate kids as needed with appropriate safeguards,” she said. “The solution is working on that kind of model.”