Critics wondered why this budget shortfall wasn’t identified earlier, before such widespread hiring, and some have questioned whether this pattern of hirings and layoffs was intentionally orchestrated to replace older, veteran teachers with younger, less-costly ones.  DCPS, under Chancellor Rhee’s name, posted on October 7^th a list of Frequently Asked Questions Concerning the Budget Shortfall and Staffing Reductions.  One of the questions was:  Did you target veteran teachers?

 The response:  “Absolutely not.  This is rumor and completely unsubstantiated.  Such a practice is not only illegal but morally reprehensible.  In addition, since many, many thousands of DPS students benefit from being skillfully taught by veteran teachers, it would be ill-advised for us to ever take such an action. 

•  The percentage of staff members over age 40 (a protected class) separated last week mirrors almost exactly the percentage of veterans within the DCPS work force.
• Employees with three or fewer years of experience are more heavily represented in the pool of separated staff members than they are among total number of DCPS staff.”

 That was the first version of the FAQ.  Later, a revised version was posted, which removed the bullet points above, and substituted the following:

 ”The experience levels affected:

•  Only 7% of teachers affected had experience of 25 years or more
• 54% of teachers affected had experience of 10 years or less
• 39% of teachers affected were in their first five years of teaching
• 17% of teachers affected were new hires;  they were in their first year of teaching”

 I’m no lawyer, but from my reading of the federal rules on equal employment opportunity, it’s actually not illegal to discriminate on the basis of experience.  It is, however, illegal to discriminate on the basis of age, and in some occupations, such as teaching, there is an extremely high correlation between age and experience.

 Rhee’s artful/deceptive response above doesn’t tell us if the individuals who were laid off differed in their experience profiles from those who were not.  The fact that 46% of the teachers who were laid off had more than 10 years of experience needs to be compared to the proportion of teachers in the District overall with more than 10 years of experience to see if there was some kind of disparate treatment. Although Rhee has in interviews repeatedly pointed to the comparison between 7% and 17% to argue that new hires were more likely to be laid off than highly-experienced teachers, I would hope that she would understand that the data say nothing of the sort. 

 In any event, the revision to the document goes on to indicate that the average age of DCPS employees is 43, and the average age of those “separated” is 49.  That is, the teachers who were laid off were, on average, six years older than the typical DCPS teacher.  Is that a little or a lot?

 I think it’s a lot.  We don’t know the details of the age profile of DCPS teachers, but sociologist Richard Ingersoll drew a picture of the profile based on the 2003-04 Schools and Staffing Survey for a 2009 report by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.  His analysis indicates that, in 2003-04, about 25% of DC teachers were 33 years old or younger, and 25% were 54 years old or older.  The median age was 46.  Working with his figure, I estimate the average age to be about 44, and the standard deviation of teachers’ age to be about 12.4.

 What this suggests is that the 266 teachers and other educators who were laid off on October 2^nd were about a half a standard deviation older than the average teacher in the DC public schools.  A difference of this magnitude is extremely unlikely to have occurred by chance.

 In a TV interview on local Fox affiliate WTTG on October 9^th, Chancellor Rhee said, “I do, though, think that it’s troubling to hear when public officials are saying things that just aren’t true.”  Me too, Chancellor Rhee.  Me too.

Testifying at a hearing before the City Council’s Education Committee, the DOE’s chief accountability officer Shael Polakow-Suransky said today that the reports will not show the preponderance of A’s that dominated the elementary and middle school reports released in September.

“You’re not going to see the big changes in the high school level that you saw at the elementary level,” Suransky said. “We didn’t see dramatic gains in the same way.”

That could be a good thing for the department, which saw its main accountability measure widely criticized when it announced that 84 percent of elementary-and middle-schools had earned an A.

Suransky explained that the elementary-and-middle-school report cards reflect year-to-year improvement on state standardized tests, so that when students’ scores on the math and English exams rose, so too did the number of high marks given to schools. High school report cards focus on schools’ graduation rates, credit accumulation rates, and Regents-passing rates, which did not show the same level of improvement, he said.

In 2008, 40 percent of the city’s high schools earned an A.

Councilman Robert Jackson, who chairs the education committee, aimed his criticism at the elementary-and-middle-school report cards.

“In essence, you must admit the standard that you set is extremely low,” Jackson said.

“In hindsight, if we could have predicted the future, we would have set the cut scores differently,” Suransky said.

The AFT took out this full-page ad in yesterday's Washington Post.

It’s interesting to note that the AFT is not holding up New York City as a “school district on the rise,” at least as far as the union contract is concerned. Randi Weingarten frequently cites New Haven, California’s ABC Unified School District and Baltimore as models for around the country, but mentions her work in New York less often.

EduWonk has other observations about whether the ad will be effective in D.C. — he argues that Michelle Rhee is impervious enough to peer pressure that what’s happening elsewhere won’t affect her at all.

Solomon’s website has the full piece up already, along with a set of audio slideshows featuring students and teachers at the school discussing how they grapple with race and education. In one of the segments, sociology and history teacher Melissa Cooper says that it’s important for minority students to have teachers they trust will understand their experiences.

“There is an assumption that I understand them and I get them, and sometimes that’s true and sometimes it’s not,” says Cooper, who is African American. “But there’s a comfort level, and I wonder how it affects children to go through perhaps their entire daily class schedule and not have people whom they believe can get them, or know their world, or understand a story about mom or dad or aunt or uncle.”

Cooper also says that suburban school districts will be where Americans next figure out how to address racial equity in public schools.

“This is going to be the place where we’re going to hash this out, and I don’t mean “this” as in, “Columbia High School;” I mean, American suburbs—this will be the place where we’ll hash out, once and for all, are we going to have segregated schools in America forever?”

“Mind the Gap” airs on 93.9 FM tomorrow at 2 p.m. and again Sunday night at 8 p.m. on AM 820. Segments from the piece will also air in a two-part series on NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Hoyt told GothamSchools that his proposed law is a kind of “kitchen-sink bill” intended to bring state law into line with the proposed federal Race to the Top regulations.

“I introduced the bill to get the discussion started about the need to change the paradigm in the state of New York and the need to compete on a national scale,” he said.

He said that he aimed high to make it likely that a powerful law could emerge from the legislative negotiation process.

In addition to removing the charter cap, Hoyt’s bill would allow student test scores to be factored into teacher evaluations, increase the number of years before a teacher can earn tenure, and let state funds be used to pay for charter school facilities. (The full list of proposed changes is at the end of this post.)

State Senator Jeffrey Klein, a long-time supporter of charter schools who signed on this week as Senate sponsor of the bill, said he believed all of the various changes were valuable as a package. “I certainly went into this with my eyes wide open,” he said. “I think everything here will enhance our education system.”

Conflict over some of the proposals may be inevitable. The ban on linking student data to teacher tenure decisions, for example, was inserted into the state budget in the spring of 2008 as a response to protests from the city’s teachers union over moves to evaluate teachers using student test scores.

But Klein expressed confidence that the proposals would garner support from across the political spectrum. “I have the utmost respect for teachers and for unions,” he said. “At the same time, I think this legislation is pro-student and not anti-teacher.”

Klein said that the state legislature was unlikely to address the bill during next month’s special session and will wait instead until it reconvenes in January. But both he and Hoyt emphasized that the competition for federal Race to the Top funds gives the legislation urgency.

Last week, Gov. David Paterson said that he did not plan to push for the elimination of the state’s charter school cap, saying that New York state is eligible for the funds without any legislative changes.

“I respectfully disagree with him,” said Hoyt, adding that the state needed to go beyond being merely eligible and instead should be on the forefront of enacting the reforms currently being pushed by the Obama administration.

“We should be in a position to get that money, and all of it,” Klein said. “Why would we gamble with not being as competitive as we can be?”

Hoyt and Klein’s bill would cause the following changes in state education law:

• Remove the ban on using student test data as a factor in teacher tenure decisions.
• Extend the length of the school year by a month, starting next school year.
• Increase the number of years a teacher may be considered for tenure from three to six.
• Require that teachers have at least a bachelor’s degree in the subject area they teach, and also to pass the subject’s Regents exam.
• Require the Board of Regents to set state exam proficiency standards at levels analogous to federal NAEP standards.
• Require the education department to develop a state-wide letter grade system for evaluating schools.
• Allow charter schools to give admissions preference not just to students residing in the same district as the school, but also to students in neighboring districts.
• Provide funding to help charter schools pay for facilities and allow charters to teach students of the same grade at different sites.
• Allow charter schools to run pre-kindergarten programs.
• Expand routes to alternative certification for teachers.
• And require the commission of education to publish comprehensive data sets on the results of state tests before the start of the next school year.

Education Reform Act

Click here to view Lehman transcripts and school records. Multimedia feature by Maura Walz.

The Bloomberg administration will investigate the whistleblowing teachers at Herbert Lehman High School who are accusing the school’s principal Janet Saraceno of tampering with students’ grades.

The teachers approached GothamSchools with students’ transcripts after some of them had submitted the same transcripts to the Office of Special Investigations, but had not heard back for months and assumed the investigation was dead. A spokesman for the DOE, David Cantor, said the investigation into the alleged grading manipulation is still open.

The city now plans to investigate the teachers as well.

Students’ education records are protected under the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act Regulations, commonly known as FERPA. Transcripts can be shared provided that “personally identifiable information” is not transmitted.

“All I can say is we are going to investigate the release of the student records publicly to the press,” Cantor said.

“The privacy of student records is protected by federal law. School staff are not permitted to provide their students’ transcripts to reporters,” he wrote in an email.

Mayor Bloomberg is hinging his campaign partly on a claim of raising graduation rates. The story at Lehman offers his opponent, Comptroller Bill Thompson, ammunition to fuel his claim that Bloomberg’s school success is exaggerated.

The transcripts given to GothamSchools reporters contained records of students’ grades as well as grade-change forms that Saraceno, an assistant principal, and a teacher had signed. Students’ identifying information had been redacted.

Former Lehman teachers stood by their decision to share the documents.

The principal “has a three-year contract and it takes the DOE an average of two years to complete any investigation,” one teacher said. “So she gets her bonus for increasing graduation rates and we’re supposed to keep quiet?”

A spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers declined to defend the teachers, saying only that the sharing of students’ transcripts is regulated by FERPA and the teachers union has no rules about it.

In its response, the Bloomberg campaign explains why city schools don’t need dedicated arts funding, which the city eliminated in 2007: 

A fixed per-pupil arts allocation does not work because no two schools are the saem. A micro example would be that a school that is adjacent to the Brooklyn Museum does not need the same resources to provide arts exposure for its students as a school in Far Rockaway would.

Thompson would restore dedicated arts funding, according to his campaign’s response. And he says he wants the arts to have a place of prominence in the city schools:

We can no longer tolerate the erosion of arts education in our schools. It is time that dance, music, visual arts, and theater are valued and treated as an integral part of a child’s academic experience.

A major criticism of Mayor Bloomberg’s schools leadership has been his failure to consult parents regarding his education policies or to revise those policies in the wake of parent opposition. According to a recent article in Downtown Express, “Bloomberg said parents need only be involved in the micro issues of their child’s education, like the child’s attendance, behavior and grades.” Beyond that, the Mayor suggested that parents could have “influence through the city councilmembers and mayor they elect.” Comptroller William Thompson released a report last May suggesting his own views on “Parent Influence on Local School Governance.”

Notwithstanding the Mayor’s remarks, a broad legally-mandated constellation of parent organizations exists to directly influence decision-making beyond the individual child. Federal law calls for extensive parent power in shaping school, district, and state Title I policies. Recent amendments to the New York State Mayoral Control statute require 32 District Community Education Councils and 3 Citywide Councils for High Schools, Special Education, and English Language Learners. The State Education Department requires School Leadership Teams and District Leadership Teams, which must include parents, to be directly involved in school-based planning and shared decision-making. A recent New York State Commissioner’s Decision held that the city’s parents were being illegally denied their mandated role in comprehensive educational planning. Chancellor’s Regulation A-660 mandates a robust system of Parent Associations, P.A. Presidents Councils, and a Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council. It is incumbent upon all administrators, from assistant principals to the Mayor himself, to respect the letter and spirit of this strong legal orientation toward parent partnership not only in pedagogical decisions regarding individual children but in school and district policy-making and implementation.

But any parent who has had a playground run-in knows that we each have different — often strongly different — views toward child rearing. So it is impossible to describe a single parent opinion regarding schools. That is one problem with the school system’s fallacious parent surveys and, just as wrong-headed, for anyone to claim representation of a single parent voice.

The conundrum of how to structure parent voices — plural — beyond the classroom is especially difficult in an urban setting because of the geographic, demographic, and numeric diversity that make our city such a vital social cauldron. As a public good, schools belong to everyone. Fundamentally, all citizens have a right to determine how their tax dollars are spent by investing their vote in elected representatives who, in turn, have sovereignty over the public weal. Parent control of school policies, perhaps a straw man invented by those inimical to a strong parent role, would thus be as exclusionary and self-defeating as would any other proposal for unelected dominance by a single, limited constituency.

That is why parent organizations such as Community Education Councils, exclusively a parent domain (students are non-voting members), can not and should not have more than an advisory role. Selected by school Parent Association officers, these volunteers simply do not adequately represent the full range of public education stakeholders, however important their informed input may be.

Further, recent legislative activity seems to pit parent against parent, weakening rather than strengthening our evolving system of parent leadership. For example, the Citywide Council on High Schools now must include representation from the Citywide Council on Special Education and the new Citywide Council on English Language Learners. But members of the CCHS (I am a past President) already include several parents whose children have special needs, are limited English proficient, or both. Are those parents to defer to the designee from those other councils? It is the responsibility of all council members to represent their entire constituency, not just their own child’s needs. Specialized representation of this sort is contrary to principles of American democracy and plays into the hands of those who would atomize rather than unite parent interests.

Finally, parent power must be wrested from the deadening grip of over-regulation. Parents are not usually lawyers and should not be forced to become experts at parliamentary procedure. Too many parent meetings become bogged down in arcane and ultimately destructive disputes about procedure rather than substance. Parents’ lack of political sovereignty should release them from undue procedural mandates. What procedural mandates exist should be read to strengthen parents’ otherwise weak voices against more powerful institutional interests rather than to set parent against parent in an embarrassing pecking frenzy over the remaining political crumbs.

This tension between unity and pluralism in parents’ role is appropriate in our complex system of school governance. Especially in New York, where most voters do not have children in the public schools, parents provide a uniquely informed constituency for everything from testing policies to school siting decisions. Parent opinion should not be assumed to be correct or even uniform, but, amid the cacophony of their multiple voices, policy makers ignore parents at their — and more importantly, students’ — peril.

Yesterday, I reported that current and former teachers at Herbert Lehman High School are accusing principal Janet Saraceno of transforming the school into a “diploma mill.” Student transcripts given to GothamSchools show that in the last year, dozens of students have been given credit for courses they failed or never took.

Mayor Bloomberg has staked his reelection on his claim that graduation rates are rising, an assertion Thompson  questioned in an audit he released as comptroller.

“Today’s article about Lehman High School grading fraud is another appalling example of Mike Bloomberg’s corrupt Department of Education,” said Thompson campaign spokesman Mike Murphy. “This is the second story this month to prove that Bloomberg has greatly exaggerated the success of his Department of Education by padding, manipulating and falsifying statistics, including graduation rates and test scores.”

Christopher Cerf, an education policy adviser for the Bloomberg campaign, defended the mayor’s accountability system, which rewards or punishes principals based on their schools’ test scores and graduation rates.

“We cannot comment on any aspects of this, but we certainly do not condone the kinds of things that are alleged. But at the same time, we believe that accountability for student outcomes is a central driver of positive reform and we believe it is critical to hold everybody in the system accountable for student results.”

The Internet is a language students know and teachers have to learn, Levy writes:

I realized that our students were hardwired for modern technology. Social networking spots like MySpace met a felt need for connecting, and sharing and collaborating. Yet our school ran as it had in the 90s, the 80s and the 70s. We’d rearranged some of the deck chairs, yet our 1.0 band was indeed playing many different tunes, and none that our students wanted to hear. Despite all of our fears, I was determined to get technology into the hands of staff and students. Students were fluent in the language of the 21st century Internet. We adults needed to quickly catch up.

Read Levy’s entire post to find out how he and his staff have brought IS 339 into the 21st century.

My goal was to paint a picture of 339′s turnaround (so far) and the role technology has played. Keep in mind — I only had eight minutes for my remarks!

A theory I’m developing is the the modern Internet is a language. I’ll be writing more about that and further fleshing it out in the coming weeks…but for now here’s a transcript of my remarks. I’ll insert hyperlinks when I can.

In August of 2004, I became principal of IS 339, a large, public middle school in the Claremont section of the Bronx. Then we had 945 students, now we’re ‘down’ to about 820. 339 is roughly 70% Hispanic and 29% Black. About 25% of our students have IEPs and 28% are English language learners. The school building opened in 1974, and had twice been shut down and reopened by the state, in 1991 and 2000.

When I arrived 2004, 339 had learned to survive day to day by doing things like locking students down in one classroom only and sending them home if there was a problem. School safety agents routinely escalated conflicts with students, and many adults had adopted an aggressive, loud approach. It felt like a boiling pot was about to explode at any moment, and when it did, the melees were memorable. Ambulances and police cars fought school buses for parking in front.

I had pledged during my very first faculty conference to bring technology to 339. Every computer in the building was from 1999 or earlier, and there were no laptops. What few desktops we had were hoarded and rationed, in a few rooms or offices. Two people knew how to connect to the Internet. The school was off line, and it was out of line. Although there were staff members who cared deeply, they were drowned out by those who didn’t. The language of lockdowns, consequences and battle only perpetuated a prison mentality.

On staff, we were disjointed and suffering in silos. No one knew what was happening, or why. I thought I was a visionary when I installed a giant whiteboard in our main hallway for daily announcements. Problem solved! That is, until 11 AM, when someone would brush their jacket on the board, deleting half of our key information. At day’s end, our institutional memory got erased from the board. We were stagnant in too many ways.

At the end of my first year, in Spring of ’05, we received hopeful news. Chancellor Klein’s administration had tapped 339 as one of 22 middle schools for a 1-to-1 Macbook laptop program. The light at the end of the tunnel might be a laptop screen.

In year two, an influx of new and enthusiastic staff brought energy but not much stability to our school. We continued to struggle. Instruction suffered and student achievement plummeted. I’d read about Fullan’s implementation dip; I never thought we’d be sinking because of it. 9% of our students were now on grade level in math. The New York State Ed department once again designated the school as SURR (School Under Registrative Review). They sent a team of ten to conduct a grueling 3-day inspection. It was demoralizing at best. One official compared our staff to a band where no one was playing the same song. I asked her if she’d seen our whiteboard.

In June of 2006, the first wave of teacher laptops and one grade of student laptops finally arrived. In late June, after our 8th grade prom, I saw one boy scrolling through his digital camera, deciding which pictures to post to MySpace. He then started sending and receiving texts on his cell phone to multiple friends, who each had a different song playing when their messages arrived.

I realized that our students were hardwired for modern technology. Social networking spots like MySpace met a felt need for connecting, and sharing and collaborating. Yet our school ran as it had in the 90s, the 80s and the 70s. We’d rearranged some of the deck chairs, yet our 1.0 band was indeed playing many different tunes, and none that our students wanted to hear. Despite all of our fears, I was determined to get technology into the hands of staff and students. Students were fluent in the language of the 21st century Internet. We adults needed to quickly catch up.

Year three we created teacher teams who met daily for common planning. Adults received training. As Jim Collins predicted, technology became an accelerant for sharing best practices and building communication systems. Daily Notes were now posted online for staff. We migrated everyone away from the city’s email system and into Gmail. Teachers started Google groups to share lesson plans, post units of study and discuss ideas. Connecting and communicating, teacher teams started to quickly transform the work they did together and the work they did with students. We were finally sharing.

In year four we used the Internet to advance from communication to collaboration. Our faculty signed on to the Google Apps—in addition to Gmail, we integrated Google Docs and Spreadsheets into all aspects of adult work in the school. From the main office to the dean’s office to the administrative offices to the classrooms we created networked systems to share information, collaborate in real time on initiatives and to track progress. For those who haven’t had the chance to use Google Docs, they provide the ability for multiple people to co-edit documents and spreadsheets in real time on the Internet for free, so that other people who are shared in can view your changes. As teachers became comfortable with these tools, they introduced them to their classroom.

Last year—year five–we received the final laptops from the original pilot, and went fully 1-to-1 for the first time. We saw that our greatest untapped resource at 339 had been the creative imaginations of our staff and students. The lightning-quick speed of curiosity and innovation was now given voice through 21st century tools. Teachers emailed students assignments, and co-edited Google docs at the same time. Students found answers to questions within minutes, posted responses online and participated in our school’s robust Internet community. The Internet’s language was now being shared between staff and students.

While they’d once felt afraid, teachers now were proud that their practice had been modernized and streamlined. Students felt motivated, professional and respected. They were using tools to prepare them to compete in high school, access better jobs and use their talents. We were fully integrated across the board…you name it, and we migrated it to the Google Universe.

By the end of last year—our first full 1-to-1 year–we celebrated our best results yet. 62% of our students were now on grade level. Our NYC progress report grade had risen from a D to a C to a B to an A. We were removed from the state’s SURR list. And most importantly, the work we were doing in classrooms was giving students creative control over their learning.

In June, we hosted and presented a first-of-its kind Global Learning Reception called Dot-to-Dot. 100% of our teachers and students posted 21st century projects, including films and blogs, some streaming live. A student made a documentary about how to create a Times Square-like hub in the Bronx. One class Skyped with Nicholas Kristof about Darfur as part of their research about genocide. The theme for every project was “Connections.” Thousands of website hits from around the world became dots on our map, and we’d started to redefine what school could be in the 21st century. This year’s Dot-to-Dot theme is “Change”—and you’re all invited.

At 339, we don’t see laptops as toys, or even as tools. We see them as megaphones to give students and teachers global voices. The modern Internet isn’t an idea, or a place. It is a language that we need to speak at all corners of our school systems and in each one of our classrooms. It is a language that has rapidly improved our school, and can help transform struggling schools everywhere.

The principal of the Bronx's Herbert Lehman High School is charged with changing students' failing grades to passing.

Teachers are accusing a Bronx high school principal hired with a $25,000 bonus to improve the school’s academics of instead transforming the school into a “diploma mill.”

Transcripts given to GothamSchools by current and former teachers show that in the last year, dozens of students at Herbert Lehman High School have been given credit for courses they failed or never took.

In some instances, a student failed a class, passed the Regents exam by a slim margin, and then had his failing grade overturned. In others, students were given two credits for a class they passed once, or for classes that never appeared on their schedules.

Click here to view Lehman transcripts and school records. Multimedia feature by Maura Walz.

Changing students’ grades is commonplace in the city’s schools and is often done by principals and teachers for legitimate reasons. In some cases, students are given credit recovery, meaning they complete a project, make up work, or re-take part of a class in order to get a passing grade. Other times, students who are on the cusp of passing a class can receive a boost from a Regents exam they passed by a substantial margin.

But teachers said that at Lehman, students are getting credit without doing any work. Dozens of students have had their failing grades overturned without their teachers’ knowledge.

“The Office of Special Investigations is investigating allegations of grading improprieties at Lehman,” said a spokesman for the Department of Education, David Cantor. “We’ll comment once we have findings.”

Lehman’s principal, Janet Saraceno refused repeated requests for comment.The four current and former Lehman teachers I interviewed for this piece spoke on the condition that their names not be published. One still works at Lehman, while the three who left have new jobs teaching at district or charter schools. The teachers approached GothamSchools after some of them had submitted the same transcripts to the Office of Special Investigations, but had not heard back for months and assumed the investigation was dead.

Robert Leder, the former principal, spoke on the record about the changes, which he says he has heard in reports from distressed teachers over the last year.

Under Pressure

Long considered to be one of the city’s best remaining behemoth high schools, Lehman has had a checkered past. At the end of the 2007-08 school year, Lehman’s veteran principal Leder resigned after investigators found that he had paid two assistant football coaches overtime wages while they were at home.

Leder’s replacement, Saraceno, arrived the next fall from the High School for Media and Communications, where she was principal. As part of a Department of Education program to lure principals to the city’s most challenging schools, she was given a bonus and the title “executive principal.” At the time, this perplexed more than a few parents and teachers, who told the city’s daily newspapers that they couldn’t understand why a school with a “B” on its latest report card needed to offer its new principal an extra $25,000 a year.

According to current and former teachers, Saraceno methodically set about increasing the school’s 47 percent graduation rate by changing students’ grades from failing to passing over the objections of their teachers and, in some instances, in violation of state regulations.

“Leder was not a perfect human. We had hoped that anybody would have been better,” said a current teacher. “It turned out his replacement was much much worse. She has changed Lehman into a diploma mill.”

Grade changing is not an entirely foreign phenomenon at Lehman. Teachers who worked under Leder said he sometimes asked them to change student athletes’ grades if their grade point average slipped below the minimum required for them to play, or if a student was mere points away from passing a class. But that process involved conversations with teachers in which Leder persuaded them to sign the paperwork, they said. Today, failing grades disappear from transcripts without warning, teachers said.

“Leder’s corruption was at least confined to a cohort of 50 kids,” said a former teacher who was one of eight math teachers to leave Lehman last year. Former and current math teachers said their department has borne the brunt of the grade changes, as it has the lowest pass rate within the school.

“Saraceno is actually worse. It’s sickening that I would take him over her,” said the teacher, who now works at a charter school.

Not long after Saraceno came to Lehman, “CRs” — Department of Education jargon for credit recovery — began popping up on students’ transcripts, replacing failing grades, several former and current teachers said.

In one case, a student failed a math class in the spring of 2006. More than two years later, in the fall of Saraceno’s first year as principal, the student’s grade was changed from a 55 to a “CR.”

Documents show that the reason given for the change was that the student had passed his Regents exam with a score of 69.

According to state education guidelines, a passing Regents score can counteract a failing course grade. But not just any passing Regents score can pull up a failing course grade; a student’s two grades are averaged together, with the Regents score counting for a third, and the student only passes if the final product is above 65.

In this case, the 69 Regents exam score was not high enough to boost the 55 course grade.

A former teacher said that when she protested the grade change, Saraceno said she’d never seen the document and that her signature was only a stamp.

“She came in and said she was going to make it an A school,” Leder said. “Part of that kind of comment would lead one to believe that maybe she felt the pressure to do that and ergo got involved in this kind of grade changing nonsense.”

Giving Credit Where Credit is Not Due

Transcripts obtained by GothamSchools show other ways students were given credits they didn’t earn. In one case, a student’s report card showed that he took three English classes in the fall of 2008, passing all of them. However, on his transcript, he was given credit for having taken six English classes that semester. Next to the three courses that never appeared on his report card and that he never actually sat in were three “CRs.”

This same student failed English 6 and then retook the class, passing it the second time. While this was done in accordance with department guidelines, what happened next was not: The student was given two credits, as though he had passed two different classes.

“I’ve seen myself over a hundred transcripts that had CRs where the kids didn’t do any work or even knew they were getting those credits,” said a former math teacher.

A list of grade changes provided to GothamSchools also shows that students who were constantly truant had their grades changed to passing ones or “CRs,” with reasons like “teacher’s request” or “home instruction” given. Leder said that while he was principal, no student with a grade of 45 — meaning the student was almost never in school — was eligible for credit recovery, but that has changed in the last year.

“It’s a sham,” Leder said of the grade changes. “You’re talking to a loose constructionist. I would bend over backwards to help a kid or a teacher. But why would a person think it’s acceptable to take a 45 and make it a 65?”

Transcripts also show that Lehman students were given credit for taking after-school classes, which are a common way for schools to offer credit recovery. But at Lehman, records show that some students were given credit for taking after-school classes that teachers say the school never offered. In one case, two students were given credit for taking an after-school math class. Two math teachers who worked at Lehman that year said the class was never taught after school, though they could not produce documents to substantiate the claim.

“A lot of the changes that have happened under the current principal are a real shift away from running Lehman as a place where academics were more of a priority to what the current principal wants it to be — a place where making the numbers look good is more important than doing the work behind them,” said a former math teacher who left Lehman at the end of last school year.

Former math teachers said Saraceno also changed their department’s grading policy, making it so that 25 percent of a student’s grade came from special assignments and projects. Previously, projects could only count for 10 percent. Teachers said students quickly caught on and would come to them, begging for projects.

The exact effect of Saraceno’s efforts to boost Lehman’s graduation rate will not be clear until November, when the DOE unveils the school’s graduation rate in its annual high school report cards.

But in a memo Saraceno sent to Lehman teachers on October 1, she congratulated the staff on the school’s results from a preliminary progress report. “We made modest gains in the graduation rate, but increased credit accumulation for first-year, second-year, and third-year students by 8-10%,” she wrote.

A spokesman for the DOE, Andrew Jacob, said the department has not made a final decision about whether to withhold Lehman’s progress report, as is sometimes done when a school is under investigation.

“We would obviously revise a school’s Progress Report as necessary as a result of any investigations,” Jacob said.

Out of a population of 4,000 students, “all you need is 300 or 400 credit recoveries to get 8 percent,” said a current teacher at the school.

A Changed School

Lehman teachers say the school is now wrapped in a gloom its students and staff hadn’t experienced under Leder, who served as principal for 29 years.

After seeing a student’s transcript with 19 “CR” notations, a teacher created a blog called “19credits” where the school’s staff routinely criticize the administration. In mid-October, an anonymous Lehman blogger created a rival blog “19stepsahead,” offering a more positive spin.

“What we would also like to see here are reports of things that are going well at Lehman, that we might be able to reproduce these successes,” the blogger wrote.

“Leder cared. He knew everybody’s name — everybody, and it’s a big school,” said Jermaine Jones, a senior at Lehman. Saraceno “knows like 10 kids names. She gives attitude to people, like if you ask her a question, she acts like you should be giving somebody else a message to give to her.”

“With Leder everyone was more comfortable going to talk about their problems with school,” Jones, 18, said. “Now a lot of people don’t come to school.”

Josh Swainson is 16 years old and is trying to pass the ninth grade for the third time. Leder “is why I used to like Lehman. Now I don’t really go to school,” he said.

A former math teacher who now works at another Bronx high school returned to Lehman recently and found it a changed place.

“The hallways are just sad and depressing,” she said. “No one is making anything, putting up any work, and the bulletin boards are all empty and the classrooms are not neat. It felt like a different place. The kids were like dude, you don’t even know.”

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Fourth-grader Francisco Gomez, 8, received his H1N1 vaccine shot this morning at P.S. 157 in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He was cheered on by city health officials and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein went to Brooklyn’s P.S. 157 this morning to give students moral support while they received the first round of swine flu vaccinations. The Bedford-Stuyvesant school is one of the city’s 125 smallest elementary schools that began to administer the vaccine today.

As fourth-grader Francisco Gomez, 8, braced himself for his shot, Klein tried to distract him with small talk about the World Series. “What’s your favorite baseball team?” Klein asked. “Do you like the Yankees?”

Afterward, Gomez said he had been nervous because he had heard the shot hurts the most for younger children. “But it only hurt a little,” he said.

P.S. 157′s principal, Maribel Torres, said that roughly a third of her students’ parents opted for the free vaccine. City health officials said they hoped between 30 and 50 percent of elementary school students would be inoculated against the H1N1 virus. Parents must sign consent forms for their children to receive the vaccine, which is given either as a nasal spray or as a shot for students with possible complications such as asthma.

Elementary schools with more than 400 students will begin to offer the vaccine on November 4, with the remaining elementary schools starting the following Monday. Middle and high school students can get the vaccine at the roughly 60 weekend clinics that will open in November, officials said.

Although there have been relatively few cases of the flu so far this season compared to last spring, Klein and city health officials said the number of cases is likely to rise and urged parents to opt for the vaccinations.