instruction. Second, the administrative process required to rate a teacher unsatisfactory is arduous. A substantial record of the teachers' inadequacies— and of the administration's attempts to intervene and remediate—must be developed. Each documented item is potentially subject to the grievance procedure set forth in the teachers' contract. Third, the teachers' contract also restricts transfers of unsatisfactory teachers to other schools. Therefore, a principal who succeeds in rating a teacher unsatisfactory must retain that teacher on her employee roster. The PASS results are also not reliable measures of teacher quality. Under SED regulations, a school that performs poorly, even if not at the SURR level, must prepare a comprehensive education plan (CEP). In an effort to help schools in this self-assessment BOE developed the PASS questionnaire. The PASS questionnaire is designed around the attributes of model, exemplary [187 [187 Misc.2d Misc.2d 33] 33] schools. The elements of such schools are used as a benchmark for self-assessment and the results of the PASS survey provide an organized basis for preparation of a CEP. A PASS review team is comprised of administrators, parents and teachers from the school, and an outside observer from BOE. The team completes the PASS review on a consensus basis. The original purpose of the PASS review became obscured as schools began to worry that PASS reviews would be used by BOE for evaluating and comparing schools. According to Robert Tobias, the head of BOE's Division of Assessment and Accountability, school administrators' concern that the PASS survey would be used as an accountability mechanism causes them to paint a rosy, rather than a realistic, picture of their schools. Instead of engaging in internal assessment, schools use PASS for public relations. Additionally, there is credible evidence that many PASS reviewers fail to apprehend the true measures of an exemplary school, and therefore grade schools by a lower standard. Most of the district superintendents who testified agreed that PASS reviews are not objective measures of school quality. Defendants' expert who testified regarding PASS reviews, Dr. Christine Rossell, a professor of political science at Boston University, appeared to have little knowledge about how the reviews were actually conducted. Dr. Rossell apparently misunderstood the reviews' scoring system in attempting to aggregate the results of the reviews. Accordingly, her testimony is not probative. D . C o m p e t i t i o n f o r Q u a l i fie d Te a c h e r s New York City's lack of a sufficient number of qualified teachers is in large measure a function of its lack of competitiveness in the relevant labor market. Unless steps are taken to improve New York City's competitiveness as compared to neighboring school districts, this problem will only get worse in the years to come. New York City competes in a common labor market for teachers and other college-educated individuals with Westchester, Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland, and, to a lesser extent, Orange and Putnam Counties. New York City is at a competitive disadvantage in this labor market, principally because New York City school teachers make substantially less and generally labor under more difficult working conditions than their suburban counterparts. Figures ranging from 20% to 36% were used by State and BOE officials to quantify the difference in teacher salaries between [187 [187 Misc.2d Misc.2d 34] 34] New York City and its suburbs. The range on these figures arises from differences in both the experience levels of the teachers being compared as well as the suburbs included in the comparisons. Plaintiffs' expert Dr. Langford conducted an independent analysis which confirms that average salaries of New York City teachers lag substantially behind those of Nassau, Rockland, Suffolk and Westchester Counties for teachers at all levels of experience. Salary differentials are consistently mentioned in SED and BOE documents as the primary reason qualified teachers choose to work in suburban rather than City schools. These findings were echoed in the testimony of BOE personnel most knowledgeable about hiring. Additionally, Dr. Ferguson's analysis of the Texas data establishes a clear statistically significant association between the performance of students within a school district and the salaries paid to teachers within that school district. Salary differentials hurt New York City in its search for qualified teachers. New York City's public schools' lack of competitiveness in the relevant labor market can be seen by comparing the qualifications of New York City's public school teachers with those who work in public schools in the counties near New York City. Dr. Langford conducted a study that suggests that New York City attracts, on average, the least qualified teachers in the relevant labor pool. He compared the qualifications of teachers residing in the City who teach in New York City public schools with those who reside in the City but teach in public schools in surrounding counties. The latter category was in the aggregate more qualified as measured by certification rates and by failure rates on the LAST certification examination. He also compared the qualifications of teachers residing in surrounding counties who teach in New York City with those who both reside and teach in the surrounding counties. Again, the teachers in this study who taught in the surrounding counties were more qualified on average than those who commuted into the City to teach in public schools. Dr. Langford also found that, while teachers in both New York City and its surrounding suburbs earn less on average than other college-educated workers, the gap between teachers and other college-educated employees in the City is substantially greater than the gap between teachers and other college-educated workers in the suburbs. The court credits Dr. Langford's findings as the result of a well-designed study based on accurate data. [187 [187 Misc.2d Misc.2d 35] 35] In addition to losing out in the competition for hiring teachers seeking employment, New York City has experienced a small but persistent annual "brain drain" of some of its most experienced teachers to the public schools of surrounding counties. Plaintiffs presented a number of witnesses who testified that New York City's competitiveness is also hurt by crumbling school infrastructure (discussed in subsection F below), the location of some schools in high-crime areas, the perception of teachers that New York City public schools are unsafe, and large class sizes. The court finds that this testimony is credible. New obstacles faced by BOE in the coming years in attracting a sufficient number of qualified teachers will include increased attrition in its workforce and the imposition of higher certification standards. Between the 2000-2001 and 2003-2004 school years, BOE predicts that it will need 41,105 new teachers due to normal rates of attrition. Additionally, BOE predicts a wave of retirements over the next five years as a large cohort of teachers known as Tier 1 eligibles reach their twentieth year of